by Nick Cutter
Did you enjoy that, Reverend?
He screamed so hard that his vocal cords frayed. He was only mildly aware when the timbre of it changed—when it came to sound a little bit like unhinged, slightly deranged laughter.
26
THE THINGS IN THE WOODS did not follow them. Or if they did, then at a distance too great for Micah to sense.
They had set off from the meadow at a hurried clip as soon as it became clear that retreat was their sole option. They had taken only what they could easily carry. Dawn washed over the woods, creating trembling pockets of light between the trees. Nothing moved. The forest was drained of natural life—or that life had been repurposed into something infinitely more grotesque.
Micah could not shake the sight of the thing from the previous night. Alive it had been fearsome. Dead, more pitiful. Its slack, flame-eaten pelt, thick as a radial tire. Its many heads and eyes and limbs. Most of all, Micah could not forget the sense of agony that radiated off of it. A thing that would like nothing more than to die, yet was kept alive by infernal mechanics Micah couldn’t possibly understand.
Initially they had run from the meadow, their metal cups and utensils rattling from the riggings of their packs. They had sprinted until their breath came in heaves. But when it became clear that they were not being pursued, their pace had slackened.
“So what the hell was that?” Minerva said.
Nobody could answer. It was nothing that should exist in this world.
“Whatever they are, they are purposeful,” Micah said. “They would prefer we not leave.”
Otis said, “What, do you think they’re . . . ?”
“Funneling us back to Little Heaven?” said Minerva. “I think that’s exactly what Shug means. Isn’t it?”
Micah offered the faintest of nods. He wasn’t sure the creatures themselves were knowingly directing them back the way they had come—perhaps whatever had minted them was doing that.
“Satan,” Charlie said. “Instruments of the devil.”
“Be sober, be vigilant,” Otis quoted tremblingly, “because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”
Hours later they walked into the midmorning sun. They were tired and dirty and fearful. Even Micah was scared—Micah Shughrue, a man who some said was so cool that he drank boiling water and pissed ice cubes. He was afraid of no man. He had glimpsed the blackness of the human heart. Yet somehow they had now passed from that known realm of evil—one he could sense in the Reverend especially, and to a lesser degree in the Reverend’s hired men—to a new and uncharted one, populated by forces Micah had never encountered. It unlocked a thirsty horror within him. One so dark he couldn’t see any light in it.
They came to a dip where the path bellied out to a cut between the trees. The land fell away in layers of shale and red dirt into a narrow valley. Micah stared through that cut and saw something he had not seen either time he had passed this spot before.
A squat shape was visible several hillsides over. A structure of some sort. It looked much bigger than a hunting shack.
Micah said, “What is that?”
“I never keyed on it until just now,” Otis admitted.
“You figure somebody’s living out there?” said Minerva.
Micah clocked the distance, judging it at six or seven miles. He could make out a narrow path winding across the valley floor.
“You’re not thinking . . .,” Otis started.
“We should take a look,” Micah said.
“That’s a good hike,” said Otis. “The daylight will be gone by the time we get there.”
“Do you want to spend another night in the woods?” Charlie asked Micah.
“There is evil at Little Heaven, too,” Micah reasoned.
“My wife and kid are there,” said Charlie.
Micah nodded. “I will go. You need not.”
“You do that,” said Otis, his face reddening. “You go right ahead and fill your boots to the brim with that. See how it works out for you.”
Charlie and Otis took a few steps down the path leading back to the compound. They looked miserable but resigned.
“I wish you would reconsider,” said Otis, abruptly penitent.
Minerva hung between them. “Ah jeez, Shug. Really?”
Micah said nothing.
“Ah, fuck it. What’s that old expression?”
Micah said, “You only live once.”
Minerva shook her head. “That’s not the one I was thinking of. It’s more along the lines of A stubborn bastard and his head are soon parted, unless I go with him.”
Micah said, “I am unfamiliar with that one.”
“Yeah, well, something like that. Let’s go, you pigheaded sonofabitch.”
Otis and Charlie watched them skid down the incline to the base of the valley, their heels kicking up puffs of red dust.
“We will return tomorrow,” Micah called up.
“Go with God!” Charlie called back.
“I’ll go with the crisp, refreshing taste of Shasta instead!” Minerva shouted. “It hasta be Shasta!”
Minerva gave Charlie a cheery wave, but she didn’t feel that way. She felt lost and freaked out. She wished she could see this situation the way Micah surely did. He wasn’t inclined to consider how things came to be. His mind was tuned toward dealing with things the way they were. To him, the creatures in the woods existed, somehow, and had to be reckoned with. Which was the best way of seeing it right now, trapped in the heart of it. Minerva knew Micah was scared—the man was tough, but he wasn’t insane—but his fear inspired a direct levelheadedness. Those awful things were an equation to be solved. Micah didn’t need to explain or understand them. He only had to act. She wished she had that particular nerve, or bone, or part of her brain that allowed her to do the same.
THEY PRESSED THROUGH the valley in the midday heat. The land was deadly quiet. They, too, walked in silence, to conserve energy and because Micah rarely had much to say. They came to a stream. The water was clear but foul, burdened with an aftertaste that slipped down the backs of their throats like toxic oil. But they drank and gagged and drank some more, as they were parched and there was no telling when the chance would come again.
Gray clouds massed against the horizon, ushering in an early twilight. Minerva’s feet ached. Blisters had swollen and burst on her heels; she could feel the warm blister broth soaking into her socks. She had not eaten since yesterday, but her appetite had deserted her, replaced in her stomach by a restless fear.
The valley bellied into a basin studded with cottonwoods. They moved through the waist-high grass, pushing the dry thatches aside with their hands. Not one cricket clung to a single blade. So terrible, Minerva thought, to be the only living things here. A person forgets how she is surrounded by life all day long. Spiders making webs, mice scurrying behind walls, raccoons feasting in your garbage cans, fruit flies colonizing your bananas. And while it could be annoying to rebag your torn trash sacks or sweep up mouse shit, at least it was normal. Otherwise, it felt like you were living on the desolate surface of an uninhabited planet.
“There,” said Micah.
Minerva followed his finger up the spine of a hill. Tracking that rise, about a mile distant, sat the dark outline of what was clearly a homestead.
“Quickly,” Micah said. “Before it rains.”
27
ELLEN BELLHAVEN SPENT the morning at Little Heaven’s glassworks. She melted the borosilicate beads, added tints, rolled and snipped it and worked the molten glass into shapes of her liking. Nobody troubled her; the Little Heavenites had bigger concerns than unauthorized use of the glassworks. The busywork kept one part of Ellen’s mind occupied while the other parts spun off on crazed orbits. She put her hands in service of small tasks to dull the riot inside her head.
Everyone here was so damn . . . odd. Ellen had known Bible bashers; they could be grating, those sideways looks confirming their belief that Ellen alread
y had one foot in the eternal flames of hell. There was also this sense—implicit, but as yet never stated—that they believed she and the other “outsiders” had brought an indefinable sickness to Little Heaven. A curse. But the thing was, Little Heaven had been ill before they had shown up. And it was only getting worse.
First there was that incident with the kids and the shrew. Then the thing in the woods she and Micah had seen. Within the compound, all sense of oversight seemed to have vanished. Parents barely minded their children, who were free to run amok so long as they didn’t go into the woods. Nobody had gone in there unaccompanied since Eli’s disappearance. It was as if the threat—and there was a threat at Little Heaven, though Ellen couldn’t pinpoint what it was—had not registered. The Little Heavenites continued on in their own obedient way. Narcotized, as if a powerful gas were being pumped up from the ground that made them accept whatever terribleness was coming.
She glanced up to see Cyril Neeps stepping into the glassworks. Tall and ferret-like, with a canine tooth that jagged down to divot his lower lip.
“Well now,” he said breezily. “What do we have here?”
She felt momentarily reduced under his predatory gaze, no bigger than a grasshopper or some other bug. Then she set her jaw. Fuck this guy.
“Just keeping busy. Nobody seems to be using this place.”
Neeps nodded cheerily, but she’d seen this kind of thing—false sunniness hiding the glint of a blade.
“Sure, yep . . . that’s about the size of it.” He smiled. “Still, shouldn’t you have asked permission first? I mean, you didn’t buy all this stuff, did you?”
He waited for an answer. When she didn’t say anything, he dismissively waved his hand. “Enjoying yourself, are you?” He laughed in a way that encouraged her to join in, although nothing he said had been remotely funny.
“Like I said,” Ellen told him, “just filling time.”
Neeps cocked his head. Assaying the steel in her spine. She stared back equitably. She wasn’t scared. It had been a long time since a man looked at her that way. She’d be damned if she would ever be scared of the Cyril Neepses of this world again.
“Filling time, huh?” His smile turned wolfish. “I can think of better ways to fill it. I’m kind of an expert at filling . . . time.”
Unflinchingly, she returned his smile. “That so?
He hitched his thumbs in his belt. “Oh, that’s a fact.”
“What about your friend? He an expert in anything?”
“Who, Virg? He’s an expert at sticking his thumb up his rear end. That, and following me around like a lost puppy. You could say I’m the brains of our particular operation.”
“Then Lord help you.”
Cyril’s smile faded. Something dark and hungry passed over his face.
Ellen said, “I can fill my own time, but thanks a bunch.”
Neeps’s fingers diddled along the hilt of a knife sheathed on his belt.
“Yeah, well, here’s the thing about women I’ve learned. Sometimes they need a good filling . . . of their time. So it’s just a matter of filling it for them until they come round to the sport of it.”
Ellen withdrew the glassblowing pole from the kiln and balanced it on the anvil. Its tip glowed white-hot. It was pointed at Neeps, right around crotch level.
“Glassblowing is my little getaway,” she said, not breaking eye contact. “Do you understand, Cyril?” She spun the pole on the anvil. Around and around. “Solitude is important for any of us, wouldn’t you say?”
Neeps stared at the glowing tip as if mesmerized—
“So why don’t you make like a tree and get the fuck outta here, Cy?”
Neeps’s eyes snapped up to her. His lips curled in a sneer. He seemed to be debating taking matters to the next level, the physical one, but something in Ellen’s face—or the searing metal pointed at his balls—prevented it.
He lip-farted. “I was trying to throw you a bone. A pity poke, plain and simple. To tell it straight, you don’t merit a good fuckin’,” he said with sunny good cheer. “I take one look at that burn all down your face and my pecker just wilts. Christ, what a sight! Face all messed up like that.” He shoved his palms toward her like a toddler pushing away a plate of peas. “Your head looks like a marshmallow someone dropped in a fire.”
“You sure do know how to charm a lady,” Ellen said.
“Maybe you got something going with that one-eyed mute you chum around with. Or the skinny bitch? You’re a slit slurper, that it? You’re as frigid as one, that’s for damn certain.”
“If that helps you sleep better.”
Cyril screwed the toe of his boot into the dirt. “I’ve been watching you. If you take one step out of line, any of you, I will happily . . .” He checked his threat. “You’re trespassing. So mind your p’s and q’s, hmm?”
“Good-bye, Cyril.”
“Good-fucking-bye, Melto,” he called over his shoulder as the door shut behind him.
NATE RAN ACROSS the woman down by the cistern outside the dry goods shed. One of the outsiders. The one with the burn on her face.
Nate had not slept again after Eli Rathbone’s visit. The night had stretched out like taffy, seconds becoming minutes becoming hours. An eternity trapped under the covers with his dad zonked out a few feet away. He felt no safety in his father’s presence. His dad wasn’t strong or especially smart. If Nate had gone with Eli—or if Eli had come into the bunkhouse and taken him by force—Nate couldn’t picture his father doing much more than crying out in horror. He didn’t picture him tackling Eli in order to rescue him. Sure, his father would search for Nate once he was gone, and he’d be weeping sorrowfully and hunting harder than anyone else. But he wouldn’t have done anything when it really mattered.
This was why Nate hadn’t bothered to tell his father about Eli’s visit. His dad wouldn’t believe him. He’d say Nate dreamed it all. And who knows? Maybe he had. When Nate inspected the bunkhouse that morning, he found no trace of Eli’s presence: no footprints in the dirt, not even the smudge of his nose on the plastic window. Nate desperately wished he had dreamed it. But the memory was full of too many perfect details—Eli’s bone-white hair, the flies with gas mask faces—to believe he’d imagined it.
He bumped into the burned woman just before noon. She was up to something in the glassworks. She emerged with her shirt dark with sweat. Nate was filling his canteen from the cistern. He had been digging marble pits out behind the dry goods shed. He used to have a sack of marbles, cat’s-eyes and oilies and king cobs, but the sack had gone missing. Nate suspected Elton Redhill, but it was un-Christian to accuse anyone of theft. Nate made the pits anyway, stabbing the heel of his boot into the dirt until he’d made a groove, then scooping out dirt with his hands. The patch of earth behind the shed looked like some crazy old coot had been digging for buried treasure without a map.
“How are you?” the woman asked.
Nate shrugged. His father had told him not to talk to the outsiders. Their thoughts were almost certainly impure.
The woman filled a cup from the cistern and drank. “Thirsty work,” she said.
She somehow reminded him of his mother, even though she did not look like her. It was just Nate’s loneliness that made her seem that way. When she smiled, the scarred skin down her face and neck stretched alarmingly, as if it might tear open. But Nate remembered hearing that scar tissue was actually stronger than normal skin, kind of like how cardboard is stronger than foolscap. It was skin that had been hurt and healed into something more durable than it had been—still, it looked pretty gross. Nate apologized inside his head for thinking that.
“I saw you doing something out behind the shed. I wasn’t spying,” she said a little too quickly, the way someone would if she really had been spying. “Qué pasa?”
“Pardon?”
“What are you doing back there?”
He shouldn’t be talking to her. But his father was cleaning up in the chapel and nobody was w
atching, and anyway, it would be rude to stand there like a lump.
“Digging marble pits.”
The woman’s eyebrows went up. “Oh? Marbles. What kinds do you have?”
Nate twisted the toe of his shoe into the dirt like he was crushing out a cigarette. “I used to have a sack. But I . . . I must have lost it.”
“Well, you’re not going to believe this, Nate—” She turned her head away, muttering something that sounded like a curse word. “Is that your name? Nate?”
Nate nodded.
“Lucky guess! You look like a Nate. I’ve been working on something that you just might like,” the woman said. “Why don’t I meet you back here?”
She returned a few minutes later. She reached into her pocket and pulled out six polished glass balls. Their insides were shot with blues and blacks and whites. They looked a lot like marbles but weren’t exactly.
“Will they do in a pinch?”
Nate took one from her palm and rolled it toward the nearest pit. It wasn’t perfectly round but close enough. They were more beautiful, more unique, than any marbles he had ever seen.
“They’re swell,” he said, picking the almost-marble up and handing it back to her.
“Keep them,” she said.
“Seriously?”
“I used the glass your father and everyone else paid for, right? They’re more yours than mine, when you think about it.”
“Yeah, but you made them.”
“It’s okay. They’re my bloopers, anyway. So take them.”
She pulled open Nate’s hip pocket and rolled them into it. They clinked against one another in a satisfying way. He could feel them in his pocket, six hard bulges against his thigh.
“Thank you.” It was the nicest thing anybody had done for him in a while.
“De nada.”
“Pardon?”
“No problem.”
The woman hung around while he shot marbles. It was nice to hold things that were his own. Back home, he’d had a few things. His bike, a shelf of books. But at Little Heaven, everyone owned everything and nothing—except the Reverend, who had permission from God to have his own special stuff. But for the rest of them, it was only their Bibles and a few personal items. Nate’s marbles had been about the only things that were his alone. Which was why they were stolen, probably. He would have to hide these new ones. There was no way he would be allowed to keep a gift from an outsider.