by Nick Cutter
The chapel was the focal point. The eye was drawn to the massive cross rising above it. The horizontal beam was almost as wide as the chapel roof. Looking westward, beyond the chapel and above the trees, Minerva could see a towering rock formation. The rock looked black, not the rust red of most of the igneous rock around there.
Charlie and Otis led them across the square. Minerva saw Ellen’s eyes zipping about in search of her sister’s kid. But the grounds were empty. They walked to a small, well-maintained lodge. Flower boxes were hung on the windowsills. The door was made of heavy oak with an ornate knocker.
The door opened as if in anticipation of their arrival. A man stepped out. He spotted the six of them—two familiar faces, four new ones. His skull rocked back in mild surprise. He recovered quickly and spread his arms.
“We have guests.” A beatific smile. “Welcome to our home under God’s eye.”
14
FUSSY.
That was the first word that popped into Minerva’s head.
Dickhole.
That was the second.
What a fussy fuckin’ dickhole.
There was nothing about the man that screamed dickhole! precisely. The fussiness, absolutely. His hair was oiled up in an elaborate pompadour—who the hell would do that out here, with the horseflies and tree sap? She suspected he cultivated the hairdo to make up for his diminutive stature; she wouldn’t be surprised if he had lifts in his shoes, too.
But a dickhole? Or a rat-assed bastard, as her father might have said? There was no definitive proof that he was, not yet. Just a marrow-deep sense.
The man wore a button-down shirt with wide lapels and cowboy boots of blue-dyed leather. Mirrored aviator sunglasses hooded his eyes. Minerva hated those—they were the sort of shades policemen wore, and you could never tell where a person’s eyes were looking.
He strode purposefully toward them. “Little Heaven welcomes you.”
Minerva said, “Little Heaven?” as if this was the first time she’d heard the name. They had roles to play now—the naïve hikers—and she hopped right to it.
“Our perfect slice of it, yes,” the man said. “I am Reverend Amos Flesher.”
He did not shake their hands—rather, he lifted his fingers limply toward them as if offering the blithest of benedictions.
“We found them in the pit, Reverend,” Otis said with a small bow. “They had fallen in.” A nod at Ebenezer. “This man’s hurt.”
Minerva caught the trace of an apology in Otis’s voice: One of them is hurt, Rev, or else we wouldn’t have brought them.
“Oh, boys. You and that pit of yours.” Reverend Amos tsked. “How did you poor folks stumble into Charlie and Otis’s pet project?”
“We heard it was a nice hike around here,” Minerva said.
The Reverend’s eyebrows lifted—a please, do go on gesture.
“We came up from the lowlands and across the Winding Stair pass ten miles north of here,” said Micah. “My grandfather made the trek. Said it was hard going, but worth it.”
“Your grandfather?”
Micah said, “Years back.”
“Before you folks were here,” Ebenezer said. “Or your pit.”
The Reverend scrutinized Eb. “You’re hurt.”
“I’ll be all right.” Ebenezer smiled warmly. “I’m not going to sue, if you’re worried.”
“You’re not dressed like any hikers I’ve ever seen.” The Reverend nodded at Otis. “I see a gun tucked in Otis’s waistband. Since I know he doesn’t carry one and it’s unlikely he found it under a rock, I take it that it belongs to one of you.”
Minerva thought: This guy might wear his hair like some discount Liberace, but he’s no dummy.
“It’s mine,” Minerva said. “Lots of animals out here.”
“There are,” the Reverend agreed. “Most hunters use rifles.”
Minerva lip-farted. “Wasn’t hunting. Just wanted to scare them if I had to.”
“Where are your tents?” Flesher said, flinching slightly at Minerva’s raspberry. “Your sleeping bags?”
“We had to abandon them last night,” Ellen said, speaking for the first time. “There was something in the woods. Some animal—animals. They chased us.”
The Reverend sighted her down his nose. “You sound like Otis. To hear him speak, the woods are full of man-eating bears and pixies and leprechauns, no doubt. Any animals in these woods are more petrified of us than we could ever be of them. That is how the Lord decreed it. My dear child, don’t you know that we are the highest order of life?”
My dear child. Did he just call Ellen that? Minerva tried to swallow her anger, but it lodged in her throat like a peach stone.
“Then why dig the damn pit in the first place?” she said hotly.
The Reverend’s gaze pinned her. She felt his eyes on her body, even if they were covered by those aviator shades—his eyes boring into her not in a sexual manner, but invasive in a different way: the feeling of sightless bugs crawling over her skin.
“Well.” He spread his hands again, signaling their conversation had come to an end. “I must prepare for the afternoon sermon. The Lord has brought you to our bower and it is our duty to shelter you. Charlie, Otis, they may stay in Greta Hughes’s old quarters. Have Dr. Lewis attend to this fellow’s ankle.”
He cocked his head at his visitors. Their faces were warped in the silver convex of his sunglasses.
“I would invite you to the sermon, but that is only for the elect here at Little Heaven. You will amuse yourselves, though, I’m sure.”
He hadn’t even bothered to ask their names. It was all this fellow and my dear child.
He really is a dickhole, Minerva thought, happy to have her first impressions confirmed.
Otis and Charlie led them to a cramped bunkhouse with two cots. They said they would send for Dr. Lewis. Their guns were not returned to them.
15
ONCE THEY WERE SETTLED, Ellen Bellhaven decided to take a tour of the compound.
“I’m going for a walk,” she announced.
“We’ve been walking for twenty-four hours,” said Minerva.
Ellen expected Micah to object. But he simply nodded. “I’ll stay close by,” Ellen promised.
The sky was scudded with clouds. A cool wind skated across the earth. The parade square remained empty. Apart from the Reverend and the woman who had opened the gate, Ellen hadn’t seen anybody since she’d gotten there.
She crossed the square. The tinkle of a piano drifted across from the chapel. The pianist must have been warming up for the service.
She didn’t want to hear the damn sermon anyway—Amos Flesher struck her as many men of the cloth had done over the years: a bully who had learned to fight with scripture rather than his fists. A wise choice on his part, as he didn’t look like he could punch his way out of a wet grocery bag. Still, her exclusion reminded her of the Catholic services she had attended with her childhood friend Susie Horton; she had to sit in the pews with the other heretics while everyone else enjoyed their tasteless wafers and watery wine.
The perimeter fence followed the northern edge of the forest. The light between the first cut of trees was thin, almost drowsy, like a summer twilight that falls through a girl’s bedroom window as she slips off to sleep. But beyond that point it grew gradually darker until nothing could be seen at all.
Ellen walked the fence line, trailing her fingers along the links. She noticed that the trees were green and healthy except for a stretch, maybe ten yards wide, where they were uniformly sick and dying. Their bark was the gray of dead fingernails, flaking away from the yellowed wood underneath. No needles clung to their branches. The ground beneath was ashen. Ellen could see no cause for it—unless someone had soaked the soil with gallons of tree killer, and who in their right mind would do such a thing?
She peered through the maze of dead limbs, leaning forward until her nose nearly touched the fence . . . She recoiled.
The light moved
differently the deeper into the woods she looked. It shifted and churned and took on a life of its own. Ellen got the unpleasant sense that it was staring right back at her. Which was utter foolishness. It was the middle of the afternoon, and neither light nor shadow had its own animus.
Her eyes lifted over the wasted trees to the rock formation looming to the west. It was massive and boxy, less a mountain than some kind of obelisk—a boxy tusk—pushed up from the earth. It rested against the horizon in solitary abandonment.
She continued past a string of bunkhouses where the Little Heavenites must spend their nights. The windows were transparent sheet plastic stapled to the frames—it would be hard to transport glass up here, Ellen guessed. But all the windows on the Reverend’s dwelling were made of glass, weren’t they? What had these people left to come here? Surely homes more impressive than these. But that was part of faith, wasn’t it? Suffering. Ellen had never cottoned to that thinking. Life was too damn tough on its own terms to go depriving yourself further.
She hoped she’d see her nephew, Nate, gazing through one of the plastic windows or chasing a ball across the square. Even seeing mailman Reggie would be fine, as it would mean Nate was nearby. They couldn’t have left, could they? Well, better if so. Better Reggie was back delivering letters and Nate back in school.
The living quarters gave way to a warehouse strung with wooden doors. All were closed except one. She peered through it into an area containing an array of familiar equipment: an open-faced furnace, metal blowpipes, and buckets of decorative glass beads. A glassblowing setup. Ellen had taken a course on it years ago—she was going through a bohemian phase while dating a modern primitive who played the pan flute in the Tenderloin district. Folly of youth.
She passed around the edge of the warehouse and found herself facing the playground.
A gaggle of children was immersed in some distraction beside the teeter-totter. Curious, Ellen wandered over. It was good to finally see some life at Little Heaven.
Three girls, one boy. The boy was not Nate—he was too old, and a redhead. Nate had brown hair, or was it black? Their laughter frothed over Ellen. They were hunched in a circle, working intently at something.
She drew closer. They all wore the same shoes—Buster Browns. The soles were cracked and scuffed. Maybe they were brother and sisters, or maybe all the children at Little Heaven had to wear the same clothes the way the Amish do? She could hear their animated whispers.
“Stir them around,” one girl said. “That will make them bite.”
The boy did something with a stick. A stirring motion followed by a series of quick jabs.
“Yes, oh yes,” a girl with plaited blond hair said, “that’s working. Do it some more.”
Ellen was five feet away. None of them had noticed her. A powerful dread built inside of her. Why was she so worried? It was just some kids playing.
“Hello,” she said.
They turned, all at once. Ellen’s breath hitched. She took a step back.
There’s something the matter with these kids.
That was her first, purely instinctive thought. They weren’t sick in an obvious way. No boils on their arms or open sores on their faces. They were not palsied, their mouths hanging open and leaking drool. And yet there was something—absolutely, fundamentally—wrong with them.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Who are you?” asked one of the girls. She wore a yellow dress that had faded to the color of old parchment. Her voice made it sound less of a question than an accusation. “You scared us.”
Their faces were caved in the same way Charlie’s and Otis’s had been, but worse—or perhaps it only seemed worse because they were young? Their flesh appeared to be slumping into their skulls, the way the earth sags before a sinkhole opens up in it. There were fine wrinkles around their mouths and eyes and even the knobs of their ears. They looked as if they had stepped from a terrible compression chamber that had added years to them.
Ellen stared past them to their industry—she couldn’t look at their too-old faces for another second. She saw a small ring of sticks jabbed into the dirt, with twine banded round to keep them in place.
Things were moving inside the ring of sticks. Quite a lot of things—
Something was thrashing around in there, too. Thrashing and squealing.
“I’m . . .” Ellen said slowly. “We were lost in the woods. Some of your people found us and brought us here.”
The boy smiled at her. It was not a pretty smile. His skin seemed too hard and white, more bone than flesh. “Little Heaven welcomes you,” he said.
Ellen stepped closer. The children moved aside so she could see. They exhibited no shame—in fact, they seemed eager to show her.
A hairless shrew was staked inside the ring. A loop of wire was knotted around its tail, the trailing end wound round a stick sunk into the dirt in the center of the ring. The shrew was covered in red ants. They surged over its body in a thick carpet, four deep in spots. The shrew shrieked as the ants mercilessly stung it.
“There are no animals left,” the boy said. “But if we’re good, he gives us one.”
He who? Ellen wondered.
“Why are you doing this?”
One of the girls said: “For everything there is a season.”
The bone-faced boy waved the stick he’d used to stir the ants like a conductor urging his orchestra toward a crescendo. He hummed a tuneless ditty. “Hmmm-hm-hmm-mmmm, ha-hum-hmmmm . . .”
The girls giggled. The boy’s fingertips were bloody from shrew bites and swollen from ant stings. He seemed to neither notice nor care.
Ellen said, “Where are your parents?”
“You talk too much,” said the girl in the faded dress. They all giggled some more.
The shrew’s struggles were slackening. Its black eyes stared out from the massing ants, dull and expressionless. A terrible soft hiss rose up, the sound of the ants’ bustling bodies. Ellen wanted to kick the ring apart. But she was worried about what these children might do to her if she stopped their barbarous game.
She knelt and pushed the children aside. She did so roughly, mildly revolted by the soapy feel of their skin. They parted willingly, brushing past her, leaving the playground. Ellen thought they had merely grown bored, or were going to tattle on her for pushing them, but they were moving toward the chapel, whose bell had now begun to toll.
The girl with plaited golden hair spun nimbly on her heel.
“You’re going to love it here,” she said. “You won’t ever want to leave.”
Ellen pulled the ring of sticks apart. She saw it had been built around the ants’ hill—they were only defending their home.
The shrew wasn’t moving anymore.
16
“A SHREW?”
Minerva forked chunky, tasteless stew into her mouth. They were sitting in the mess: Minerva, Ellen, Micah. Ebenezer was back in the bunkhouse, waiting for the doctor to look at his ankle.
Ellen had found them here shortly after her encounter with the children. She could only manage a bite of stew. Her appetite was gone. She had buried the poor shrew in a patch of dirt along the fence. Its body was swollen to double its size from the ant venom, so much that its skin had split open.
“They pinned it on top of an anthill,” she said. “They tortured it.”
Minerva picked mystery meat from her teeth. “Little shits. Well. Who am I to criticize? I had a magnifying glass as a kid. You think I used it to look at stamps? I must’ve fried a small city’s worth of ants.”
Ellen nodded. She, too, understood how kids could be. But it was one thing to allow nature to take its course—to watch a spider consume a fly in its web, say—versus actively pushing a horrible outcome. There was something sadistic about it. Not to mention there had been four of them. One child engaging in solitary sadism, okay. You put that kid on a watch list. But to see four of those children celebrating an animal’s suffering . . .
The mess was
empty apart from the cook who had served them the stew. When they had asked the cook where they should sit, he just flapped his hand toward the back of the mess.
“They didn’t look well,” Ellen said. “The kids. They looked . . . malnourished. I’ve never seen anyone with scurvy—could that be it?”
“They could be underfed,” said Minerva. “Who knows what they eat out here, or how often. Could be some lean days.”
“Yeah, but isn’t that abusive?”
Minerva shrugged. “Not if they signed up for it. Not if they stay.”
“This place,” Ellen said. “I don’t like it. I don’t like him. The Reverend.”
“We will soon depart,” said Micah.
They might—the hired guns. Ellen realized they had been tasked with getting her here, nothing more. They had lost their guns the other night, and it was not shocking that they would want to leave, seeing as the denizens of Little Heaven were quite unwelcoming. But could she go? After seeing those kids and catching a sense of the sickness that appeared to infect this place—and after encountering those things in the woods last night, the creatures that had chased them relentlessly—could she leave without her nephew? What could she tell her sister? Sorry, Sherri, the place creeped me out. I had to hightail it. Even if Nate seemed okay now, who was to say he wouldn’t soon be infected by whatever was spreading around here?
But was anything happening? Or was she just spooked by Little Heaven’s weird vibe and its pompadoured head honcho? It wasn’t like they were sacrificing virgins or dancing naked in the light of the moon.
Not that you know, anyway, said a wary voice in her head.
“I don’t like not having our guns,” Minerva said.
Micah nodded his agreement. “Our weapons are a ways off,” he said. “We do not want to return to the campsite. Not yet.” He lowered his voice. “We will keep an eye out. Perhaps there is a way to get our hands on something.”
The chapel bell tolled as the service ended. People began to file into the mess. They had a glaze-eyed expression that made them look like sleepers roused from a pleasant dream. They filed in silently, shoes whispering on the floorboards. Most of them wore field clothes, overalls and dungarees, even the women. They took notice of the new arrivals, but nobody stopped to say hello. There were about forty in all. Ellen counted fifteen children, including the four who had tormented the shrew. The oldest could have been thirteen, the youngest a toddler.