Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  Amos had lived at the orphanage for sixteen years. His was the longest residency in its history. The goal was to have every child adopted into a God-fearing family. But Amos never was. He would spend a few weeks with a family, but they always sent him back. One time, he had overheard his prospective mother and father whispering with the nuns.

  Peculiar boy. Strange tendencies.

  All the other boys and girls got adopted. Even the dwarfs and the ones with harelips and the ugly specimens with IQs no bigger than their belt size. They were shipped off to families who lived in sparkling houses overlooking the bay. Amos stayed at the orphanage with the nuns and the pea green floor tiles.

  The nuns became his surrogate mothers. None of them took a shine to Amos—they treated him as a burden once it became clear he would never get adopted. But one of them, Sister Muriel, saw it as her duty to teach him the wages of sin. And the wage was high, oh yes. Your immortal soul.

  Prurient desires are the devil rapping at the door to your soul, she said to him. If you give in, boy, you let Satan trip-trap in on his cloven hooves.

  She meted out discipline for lustful behavior. It happened a lot with the older boys and girls. If Sister Muriel found out that a boy had been fiddling with his dirty stick or a girl with her pink button—and Sister Muriel had an unerring way of knowing this—those transgressions would be met with lashes.

  Sister Muriel’s discipline did not extend to the encephalitic or soft-brained orphans—God’s children, as they were known—who were kept in a separate ward. Those unlucky souls should be allowed to act on the impulses other boys and girls must stifle, she reasoned. Amos had not seen it that way at all. All vice was an affront to the Lord, was it not? And if those imbecilic simpletons could not check their acts of self-gratification, why should they escape punishment? It wasn’t fair.

  Once he turned twelve, the nuns began to assign duties to Amos so he could make himself useful. One of those duties was to preside over God’s children during naptime. Many of them had to be strapped down so they didn’t hurt themselves—some of them shook so badly that the bonds actually helped them sleep: they would struggle uselessly for a few minutes, then fall into an exhausted slumber.

  Amos would walk the rows of cots in his crepe-soled slippers, same as the nuns wore. They made no noise on the tiles. Sunlight streamed into the ward, honey gold on all those terrible misshapen bodies.

  One of God’s children, a boy named Finn, rarely slept. He had a head like a pumpkin, his features stretched across that bulging canvas. He was thirteen or fourteen, nobody knew for sure, and nearly blind. During naptime, he would work at his wrist straps until he popped one hand loose. That hand would immediately go to his crotch. He masturbated furiously. His erection was a permanent fixture. All day, that fleshy spike in his drawers. Sometimes he would orgasm without even touching himself. He could bring himself to climax with the workings of his mushy mind alone.

  Amos wondered what Finn thought about. Girls? Boys? Maybe just the pressure of his hand on his penis? Finn only produced guttural groans and blabbers, so it was impossible to say. But Amos didn’t like it. Finn strained against his straps so diligently that his wrists were forever scabbed. The nuns had to change the bloody linens every day. Finn ought to be taught a lesson.

  Amos knew every crevice of the orphanage, and stole a pin from the nuns’ sewing room. He didn’t consider it stealing, though, because he was doing the Lord’s work.

  That afternoon during naptime, he crouched beside Finn’s bed.

  “Stop your fiddling, Finn,” he whispered, liking the way the order rolled off his tongue. His voice had already developed a rich tenor. “Or else.”

  Finn just grunted and continued to work at his straps. His erection tented the soft material of his sleeping gown.

  Amos pulled the pin out of his sock, where he’d put it for safekeeping. It was three inches long. He pushed it through Finn’s gown until the tip dimpled Finn’s skin. Finn grunted quizzically. Amos pushed harder. The pin broke Finn’s flesh, skewering a half-inch into his thigh. Finn moaned. He seemed to enjoy it. Interested, Amos pushed harder. Finn made a noise that could only be interpreted as one of ecstasy. He never stopped trying to get out of his restraints. How very odd.

  For the next few days, Amos stuck Finn with that pin during naptime. He stuck a few of the other children, too—none of the ones who could talk, however. Their reactions were more in line with Amos’s assumptions: inarticulate screeches of pain. But Finn liked it. He loved the pain. It made him feel more alive, maybe, or it deepened the pleasure he was already experiencing. That, too, was a sin. And Amos was participating in it. But he was learning some very important things.

  Before that week was out, the nuns noticed the bloody pricks up and down Finn’s torso. Bedbugs were suspected. The mattresses had to be fumigated. But Sister Muriel gave Amos the stink eye, and he was taken off naptime duty. Sensing he would be questioned, he dropped the pin down the playground storm drain.

  The experience taught Amos this: he enjoyed being in charge. He had never had that agency in his life. And it stood to reason that people liked to be dominated. Not just morons like Finn—regular everyday folks. They needed to be told what to do and how to act. But you couldn’t just stride up and start bossing them around. You needed to get ahold of the whip hand somehow. People knew that they were sinful and licentious. Finn showed it plainly, but most people wore a mask. Under that mask were all the depraved, malignant elements of their souls. They wanted to be punished, because after punishment comes forgiveness.

  And if Amos were to punish those people as he saw fit, well, it was a punishment that God would surely smile upon.

  To hurt is to love, he now thought as he restlessly paced his quarters. The Conkwright bitch. Bitch, BITCH. Speaking out against him. She wanted to flee like a chicken-gutted weakling, shrieking for help. It would ruin everything. He didn’t want his flock to think about the outside world; it should not be acknowledged except as the seat of sin. He had placed blinders over their eyes and now one of them was trying to rip those blinders off.

  Eli. Stupid child. Run off into the woods. He would come back; he would be fine; why wouldn’t he be? Children had run away from the orphanage all the time. Hopped the fence and vamoosed. If they never returned, it wasn’t necessarily because calamity had befallen them. It was because they didn’t want to come back. But Eli had no choice. His family was at Little Heaven. His God was here.

  Amos would set everything to rights tomorrow. He would call the flock in from the woods whether or not the boy had been found. He would speechify to them until he saw that stunned, goatlike gloss touch their eyes again—a look he first became familiar with years ago, preaching atop a soapbox in Haight-Ashbury, amassing a small throng of worshippers. He’d soon gathered enough to start his own ministry. He understood the keys that opened the locks to human nature better than any head-shrinker. Those keys were labeled Vice, Punishment, Forgiveness. That last key was the crucial one. If you withheld it, banishing unbelievers from not only the Kingdom of Heaven but also the earthbound circle of fellowship they had come to know . . . that was the worst thing they could possibly imagine. It kept them at heel.

  Amos stopped before the window. Night had drawn down on Little Heaven, but the security lamps burned. He stared at his church, topped with that mighty crucifix.

  He stood, transfixed, listening to the Voice.

  It came to Amos every night. God’s Voice—whom else could it belong to? He let it settle into his bones, soothing him. The Voice had already warned there would come a dissent. Amos had known this before the first fence post went up at Little Heaven. It was why he had hired Cyril and Virgil, whose acquaintance had been made through unsavory but needful methods.

  Any flock could stray, despite the best efforts of its shepherd. That was why a smart shepherd trained a few ill-tempered dogs to keep the sheep in line.

  He would weather this storm. He would cast out the irritants and prev
ail. He must. God had a plan for him. He felt it gathering in the deepest recesses of his mind: that other voice whispering to him, using words he could not make out. A low continuous drone like the massing of flies over rotted offal. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

  He retreated to his bed, where he lay stiff as a rod. Without being aware of it, he began to knead his groin. He opened the night table and pulled out the long sharp pin that lay beside his Bible.

  Release, he thought. By God, release.

  20

  EBENEZER COULD NOT SLEEP his second night at Little Heaven. His blankets itched, as did his ankle while it healed. He rolled off the cot and pulled on his trousers and one boot. The others were still sleeping. He hobbled out the door.

  The night was cool. Combers of ground fog rolled across the square. It flooded over his legs, so thick he could barely see his own feet. A flashlight snapped on behind him.

  “What are you doing?”

  He turned. Minerva was pointing the light directly at his face. “Lower it,” he said.

  She snapped it off. Folded her arms against the chill. She beheld him the way she always did—as if picturing how his head might look on the end of a sharp stick.

  He was fairly certain she hated him. That was not so odd in itself—Eb had repulsed plenty of women over his lifetime—but there was no legitimacy to her loathing. On their first encounter she had tried to kill him as a matter of business. That he could understand and even approve. Why, then, throughout their acquaintanceship, had her hatred not slackened? It wasn’t the color of his skin. Eb could sniff a racist at twenty yards. It wasn’t his Englishness, either. So what, then?

  “I was going to pick posies for you,” he said. “On account of you being so peachy keen.”

  “Oh yeah?” She spat in the dirt. “Drop dead in a shed, Fred.”

  “Dive off a cliff, Biff,” he shot right back.

  Little Heaven was silent. The only light came from the security lamps strung round the perimeter. The fog hung thickly between the first cut of pines. It swirled in odd patterns, as if at the beck of forces Ebenezer was not attuned to.

  They heard it then. Ringing, singsong. The laughter of a child.

  They moved toward it, Minerva walking and Eb limping. Ebenezer didn’t want to take another step—the laughter had developed a throaty undertone he didn’t much care for—but his feet would not obey him. He kept gimping on, vaguely horrified at his inability to stop. Minerva’s flashlight shone on the ground in front of them. Nobody else was awake. The compound was at rest. It was just them, alone.

  The sound was coming from behind the chapel. The shadows were heaviest there, as the chapel lay at the edge of the compound facing the trees. The flashlight illuminated its rough boards, the paint beginning to flake. The laughter hummed against Ebenezer’s ears like the beat of tiny wings.

  “Hello?” Minerva said.

  The laughter stopped. In its place was a dry crackly noise that made Ebenezer picture wet seashells, thousands of them, tumbling over one another.

  They rounded the side of the chapel that faced the woods. A shape hunched under the silhouette of the crucifix. The fog was hugged tight to it.

  “Who’s there?” Ebenezer said.

  The flashlight beam jittered toward the shape; Eb got the sense Minerva was reluctant to illuminate this thing, whatever it was. The light crept over the chapel wall and down, falling on the head of the figure sitting there. The fog peeled back, divulging more and more of its body—

  A boy. He sat facing away from them. The mist still clung to his lower half. He was doing something with his hands. The dry, chittery sound was quite powerful now. Ebenezer had no clue what was making it, but the noise itself was enough to sour the spit in his mouth.

  They approached the boy, who seemed to have taken no note of them. Fifteen feet, ten feet . . . the boy turned. He was naked from the waist up. His ribs protruded. His clavicles jutted like beaks. His flesh was white as soap. His eyes were gray. The color of a slug.

  Minerva stumbled back and bumped into Ebenezer. He felt the beat of her heart through her clothes—it was hammering hard enough to rattle her entire frame.

  The boy smiled. He was bucktoothed—teeth like elephant toes. His slug eyes seemed to pin them both, though lacking pupils it was hard to tell for sure.

  The shucking, chittery sounds intensified . . .

  The boy held a dead bird in his hands. The bird’s eyes were the same as the boy’s. He stroked it tenderly. His demeanor was quiet and content, as if he had been found playing with his Matchbox cars in his bedroom.

  There was something the matter with one of his hands. The skin seemed to have melted or calcified or fused, the fingers welded into a solid scoop of flesh. He stroked the bird with it, lovingly so. Later, Ebenezer wouldn’t be sure he had seen any of this—there was a vacancy in his memory, a dark sucking hole where something dirty had been buried.

  The mist rolled away from the boy’s lower half, the white wisps trailing off to reveal a bristling carpet of perpetual industry.

  Bugs. Bark beetles and cockroaches and God knew what else. Millions of bugs covered the boy to his waist. They surged around his hips, antennae waving, crawling over and around one another the way insects do—a way that humans never could, because that mindless proximity of bodies would drive any person mad. They flooded around the boy’s legs, fanning out in a ten-foot circle. Most of their bodies were the brown of a blood blister, but some were a larval albino white. They massed in a pattern that seemed random, but if you looked closely, their movements appeared to have some spirit of organization.

  Minerva turned to Ebenezer, her eyes bulging in horror. Ebenezer was barely able to stifle a scream himself—when was the last time he’d screamed in abject fright? As a child, surely, at the prospect of the boogeyman lurking under his bed.

  The boy beheld them with those horrid, soul-shriveling eyes and said, “I am so happy to be back home.”

  21

  THE NEXT MORNING, Brother Charlie Fairweather showed up at their bunkhouse.

  “Mind if I come in?”

  Micah was still trying to piece together the events of the past night. He’d heard Eb get up, and Minny after him. He hadn’t made much of it when they both stepped outside—Minny wouldn’t make her move now, he knew, so the most she’d do was jaw at him a little.

  Minutes later, there was a big commotion. Had Micah misjudged it—had she tried to flatline Ebenezer? It would have to count as strange timing, but Minerva was an odd woman. But then he’d heard the Reverend yelling: “Cyril! CYRIL!”

  Turns out that the boy, Eli, had been found behind the chapel. It was Eb and Minny who found him. But by the time Micah made it to the square, the Reverend had already hustled the boy off to a private bunkhouse. Nobody had seen him since.

  Afterward, Ebenezer and Minerva sat on the same cot. Minerva’s face was white as clotted cream, Eb’s a bloodless gray. They said they had come upon the boy covered in bugs. The boy had pupil-less eyes. Something fucked to do with his hand, too.

  Following this revelation, serious consideration was given to just up and leaving. What if they were to kidnap Nate? Knock him out—did that Doc Lewis have any ether? If Reggie raised a stink, Micah was willing to knock him out, too, either with ether or his fists. But the plan was imperfect. Eb was still hobbled, for one. And chances were they’d be spotted. While Neeps, Swicker, and the Reverend would be happy to see the ass end of them, they weren’t likely to permit Micah to cart one of their lambs away over his shoulder like a sack of oats. Neeps and his partner had guns, too, and things had soured to the point where Micah was pretty sure they would use them. After that, it would be him, Eb, and Minny flung into shallow graves with quicklime eating their eyes. Maybe Ellen, too. Still, snatching the boy could be their best shot. Do it quiet, cause a distraction, leave in the pandemonium. Let Little Heaven go to hell in a handbasket and read all about it in the papers a few months later.

  They were discus
sing this when Charlie knocked. Micah opened the door and ushered him inside. Charlie cleared his throat and said, “A few of us been talking. Me and Otis, Nell and Jack Conkwright. Plus my own wife. We think . . . well, we might like to take a break from Little Heaven.”

  He spoke as though the words gave him physical pain. He peeked out the window to make sure nobody was poking around outside. “We figured you could help us,” he said.

  “We’re hikers,” said Micah.

  “You aren’t no hikers. And why wouldn’t you want to leave?” said Charlie. “Why not we all go? Safety in numbers.”

  “We cannot all go.” Micah nodded at Ebenezer, laid up on his bunk. “Not with him in his shape.” He eyed Charlie cagily. “Why now, Charlie? What is prodding you?”

  Charlie shifted foot to foot like a man with a bladderful of piss. “Was there something wrong with Eli’s eyes?” he asked Minerva. “Dr. Lewis says it isn’t anything. A milky glaze . . . an occlusion, he called it. Just a coating, like pulp or something. He wiped it away and Eli’s eyes were just fine underneath.”

  Minerva rolled her own eyes. “I think Lewis wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. He’d hold it until your Rev gave him permission to spit.”

  “Eli’s off limits,” Charlie said. “Nobody’s seeing him ’cept the doc and the Rev. His folks haven’t come back yet. Two full days they’ve been gone.”

  “Your utopia is blowing up,” Ebenezer said.

  Charlie stuffed his hands into his pockets. “The Lord sets trials for us all. And I’m not one to scurry from them. But I got a kid, right? My son, Ben. And to be honest, he’s not been himself lately.”

  “What do you mean?” Ellen said, leaning forward on her cot.