Stalking the Nightmare by Harlan Ellison

Author:Harlan Ellison [Ellison, Harlan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Anthologies, Horror, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780425071694
Google: EGzYvI0ekqEC
Amazon: 0759230188
Barnesnoble: 0759230188
Goodreads: 453229
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2014-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

FINAL TROPHY

It was the grisliest trophy of them all. Hanging there in the main club room of the Trottersmen, it was a grim reminder that not all the members were idle playboys who had bought their memberships with animals shot from ambush in the interdicted kraals of Africa or the blue mist-jungles of Todopus III.

It was a strange trophy, plaque-mounted between the head of a Coke’s hartebeest and the fanged jaws of a szlygor. There was the damndest watchfulness in the eyes.

It had been Nathaniel Derr’s final grant to his club. A visitor to the Trottersmen’s gallery (invited down for the weekly open cocktail party) could walk through room after room filled with the bloody booty of two hundred hunting expeditions Derr had commissioned. A visitor (whether hip-booted spacer or effete dignitary) would surely marvel at the quantity and diversity of wildlife Derr had mastered. Photoblox showed him proudly resting one foot on the blasted carcasses of Mountain Gorilla and Cape Lion, butchered Hook-lipped Rhino and puma. Hides with the Derr emblem branded on them festooned every wall: cheetah and javelina, Huanaco and Sika Deer, deeler and ferrlcat. The mounted heads were awesome: bull elephant and prestosaur, king cobra and desert wolf. The word hunter seemed weightless when applied to Nathaniel Derr; perhaps agent of destruction might have approached the reality.

Even among the Trottersmen he had been sui generis. His fellow clubmen had called him a fanatic. Some even called him butcher—but not publicly. Nathaniel Derr had left the Trottersmen almost thirteen million dollars.

And the final trophy.

But if the visitor was particularly trustworthy, and if they had all taken several stingarees too many, and if the visitor wheedled properly, the Trottersmen might just tell him the story behind that gruesome trophy.

The story of Nathaniel Derr’s last kill. And of his visit to the planet Ristable.

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