Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  “You like it here?” the woman asked. She was looking somewhere else, as if it didn’t matter much to her what Nate said.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s what God wants.”

  She faced him. “And you feel . . . safe? I mean, I know you feel safe with God watching over you. That’s great. But here in Little Heaven?”

  Nate nodded, but it took a while. “Sometimes I miss my old home. Miss my mom.”

  “It’s natural to miss home,” she said.

  “I think some of the other kids miss their homes, too.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Nate swallowed. Was he actually going to talk about this to a total stranger? Sure, she gave him some marbles, but Nate and his father could get exiled for this sort of thing.

  “I think . . . I don’t know. Just that everything feels a little weird lately. People aren’t acting like themselves.”

  The woman nodded as if she understood. Maybe she did. She’d been here long enough to feel it.

  “And then last night I think I saw Eli Rathbone, the kid who went missing, walking around with no shirt on in the middle of the night.”

  Nate clamped his hand over his mouth. The words had spilled out crazily, without his even thinking about them. He realized just how badly he needed to tell someone, even if it was a woman he’d never met before and wasn’t sure he could trust. But maybe that was it—she was a stranger, so she would understand better than somebody who was stuck in the same monstrous machine.

  She leaned forward, prompting him to speak. “What . . . ?”

  “He didn’t look too good,” said Nate. “He . . . uh, looked like he was almost dead. Or like he was dead, which is stupid. This one time my mom took me to the drive-in. We watched To Kill a Mockingbird. Mom gave me a dime for a Zero bar. Coming back from the concession stand, I saw the movie playing one screen over. It was called Premature Burial.” Nate shook his head. “I shouldn’t have watched it. There was this dead guy, all white and hungry, crawling out of a casket. Grave dust was puffing off his shoulders. I had nightmares for a week. Anyway, that’s kind of how . . .”

  “How Eli looked?”

  Nate swallowed. “Yeah.”

  “Did you tell anyone about this?”

  “Only you.”

  “Why not your dad?”

  “He wouldn’t believe me. He’d say I have an overactive imagination. That it’s the devil burrowing into my brain.”

  “Are you going to tell anyone?”

  “Maybe I dreamed it,” said Nate hopefully, but the look on the woman’s face said she wasn’t so sure about that. “Nobody has seen Eli since he got back,” Nate went on. “Maybe he’s okay.”

  “My friends saw him,” the woman said. “Before the Reverend took him away. The way they tell it, Eli didn’t look so hot at all.”

  “Oh” was all Nate could say.

  “Enjoy the marbles, okay?” She glanced over her shoulder as though she’d felt eyeballs tiptoeing up her spine. “And if you see anything else weird or scary, will you promise to come tell me?”

  He hesitated, unsure.

  “Nate,” she said, “I believe you.”

  Relief washed over him. “Okay,” he said. “But I hope I don’t see anything.”

  “Me, too.”

  She returned to the glassworks. A frigid wind screamed around the edge of the shed and brought up goose pimples on Nate’s calves.

  28

  THE PRESTON SCHOOL FOR BOYS.

  These five words were stamped on a strip of tin that arched over the entry path. But the wooden poles that had once held the sign aloft had rotted; the sign hung from the second pole on a rusted spike, the tin eaten through by rain and wind.

  The path itself was just a ghost, two narrow strips grown over with weeds and bracken. A set of pitted concrete steps—only two of them, like a staircase that had been abandoned in midbuild—sat beside the path, just past the sign. These were wagon step-downs: a driver would pull a horse-drawn cart beside them to allow passengers to dismount without spraining an ankle.

  “Greeeen Acres is the place to be,” Minerva sang. “Faaaarm livin’ is the life for me.” Off a look from Micah: “What, you don’t watch TV? What the hell do you do at night, Shug—stare at the hands on the clock?”

  They walked toward the buildings. Minerva tried to whistle the Green Acres theme—anything to drive the stony silence away—but a scouring wind wicked the spit off her lips.

  “Old private school, you figure?” she said. “Rich folk sending their Chads and Coopers and Athertons out to the sticks to put some bark on their satiny skin?”

  Micah shook his head. “Reform school. Juvenile delinquents.”

  “So you’ve heard about this place?”

  “No. Just ones like it.”

  The Preston School for Boys appeared to be made up of three primary buildings. Two large outbuildings and one house. They approached the larger of the outbuildings. Its door hung cockeyed on rotted hinges. Inside were two rows of bunk beds, five to a side, enough to sleep twenty kids. Ashen light filtered through the dirt-caked windows. The bed frames were remarkably well preserved. The mattresses had a few rips and tears where the horsehair was leaking out. Shingles had blown free of the roof in spots, creating gaps where the sun had bleached the floorboards. But overall, there was an oddly hermetic, museum-quality air to the interior.

  Words had been scratched into the far wall. Each letter gouged into the wood—frenzied-looking strokes with a penknife or other sharp object.

  Why is 6 afraid of 7?

  789! 789!

  “A riddle,” Micah said. “Six is afraid of seven because seven ate nine.”

  They walked between the bunks. Old footlockers with cracked leather hasps lay at the foot of each bunk. Minerva opened one. Inside sat a tin toy. A stork wearing a top hat. When she wound a key on the stork’s back, the thing chittered to life. First it tipped its hat. Then its long beak opened to reveal a tiny swaddled infant lying on its tongue. Most of the baby’s face was eaten away by rust. The key revolved. The stork’s beak snapped shut on the baby. The gears wound down.

  Minerva turned the toy over. Stamped on its bottom was: GELY TOYS 1870. A ripple of discomfort raced up her spine. She put it back in the footlocker, disliking the feel of the metal on her fingertips: warm and greasy, as if it had just recently sat in a child’s clammy hands.

  Micah inspected some of the other footlockers. More than a few were empty. Those that weren’t held scant possessions: moldering Bibles, crucifixes, a glass jar half full of marbles, a doll made of braided hair. Items the boys who’d once slept in these beds had been allowed to bring, or else had smuggled in.

  Minerva said, “How many boys were here, do you figure?”

  “Hard to know,” said Micah. “Ten. A dozen.”

  “It’s a long way from anywhere.”

  “Better than jail.”

  “If you say so.”

  They went back outside. The land past the sleeping quarters lay flat in the afternoon sun. A metal plow, the kind hauled by oxen, stood not far from a boarded-over well. Fifty yards from the well, Minerva sighted two squat metal boxes in a nest of weeds. They weren’t much bigger than coffins. They had also rusted through in spots, though the metal was quite thick.

  “What the hell are those?”

  Minerva walked across the field until she drew near to the boxes. Each had a door on the side. She lifted the latch, knelt, and opened one. Micah followed her. He watched, saying nothing. Minerva caught the smell of rain-rinsed steel and something else, more primal, still traceable after all these years. She got down on her hands and knees and stuck her head and shoulders inside one box. Words had been scratched on the metal. Fanatical and somehow helpless ones, etched with sharp field rocks.

  HELP and OUT and SORRY and PLEASE.

  A lot of PLEASEs.

  All that, plus two alternating words, scratched with terrible precision on the lower left side.

  FLESH. BEA
ST. FLESH. BEAST. FLESH. BEAST.

  She squirmed out of the horrible box. Jesus, that couldn’t possibly be legal. But this place was in the middle of nowhere. Who would have been watching?

  Micah took in her shocked pallor. “It was a different time,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” Minerva spat back, trembling with rage. “Basic humanity is timeless, isn’t it? These were boys.”

  They carried on to the other large building, which turned out to be the mess. Like the sleeping quarters, it was intact. The chairs and tables, immaculate. Jars of preserves lined the kitchen cupboards. The seals had burst and many jars had broken, but this had happened so long ago that the stink was gone. The food, whatever it had been, was no more than a crusted stain. No animals had been at the jars. No insects, even. The damage was simply the result of the decades passing by.

  “Bizarre,” Minerva said. “It’s as if this whole place has been . . .”

  “Curated,” said Micah.

  They exited the mess and made their way toward the house. The front of the house, the porch and veranda, was black from fire. It had not engulfed the entire structure, but it had blown out the front windows and charred the veranda roof, the wooden ribs of which sagged down in fire-thinned quills. Minerva noted the effigy of a rocking chair heat-welded to the porch. She imagined the owner of this house sitting on that rocker in the high heat of a summer afternoon, watching his young charges till the fields. From this distance, he would have heard the boys screaming in the hot boxes, too.

  The porch creaked ominously but bore their weight. They walked through the gutted door frame into the house. The fire had made no inroads here. A thick layer of dust had settled over everything. The furniture was still in good enough shape to fetch a fair sum at an antiques show. There wasn’t much of it, however, as the house’s occupant seemed to prefer a spartan living style.

  A rack of rifles lined a cabinet in the front room. Micah swung the glass front open and inspected them.

  “Civil War era,” he said. “That is a Lindsay model. A Whitworth, there. These guns are over a hundred years old.”

  They went upstairs. The walls were papered with a pattern of cabbage roses faded to dim blots. The front bedroom overlooked the mess and sleeping quarters. A pair of field binoculars rested on a tripod before the window. Minerva peered through them. She could see across the fields to the woods fringing the basin that they had climbed earlier.

  The room had a desk. The home’s sole photo sat upon it. A sepia shot of a man whose large round head sat atop a thick neck. A walrus mustache. Fat fleshy lips. He stared forward with a certain imperiousness, as if challenging the viewer to contradict his view of the world.

  Augustus C. Preston was written on a brass nameplate below the photo.

  “The lord of the manor?” said Minerva.

  “I reckon.”

  “He kept a framed, labeled photo of hissown self on his desk?” Minerva spat on the floor. “Maybe he had Alzheimer’s. Needed to remind himself of who the hell he was.”

  Micah opened the desk drawers. Receipts and logbooks, all dated the years 1873 and 1874. The papers were yellowed and dry; a few slips crumbled apart in his fingers. Minerva saw receipts for shipping notices, sums paid, debits owing. Another notebook was labeled ENROLLMENT. Ten boys were listed, between the ages of nine and fifteen. Walter Albee. Percy Snell. Horace Fudge. Cornelius Benn. Wilfred Tens. Five more. Orphan was marked beside eight of the ten names, and Ward of the State beside the remaining two. Recidivist was jotted beside six of the ten—even Merle Pugg, the nine-year-old.

  Micah found a sheaf of letters in another drawer, all sent from one Conrad Preston. He teased the first letter out of its envelope. It was dated August 17, 1874. He looked it over and then passed it to Minerva.

  “Read it.”

  Dearest Auggie,

  LEAVE THAT PLACE. I BEG YOU.

  My brother, you must. That godforsaken wilderness has clambered into both you and your misbegotten charges. I fear something dreadful shall befall you.

  You speak of a voice. A shadowy herald calling to you from the trees. But do you not recall it was a voice that called you into that blasted wilderness in the first? The voice of God, as you told me? Perchance it was, Auggie dear. And so you set about building your refuge, where you only wished to educate young striplings under the watchful eye of the Lord—while never sparing the lash, as it must be.

  But now you write to me of such grim tidings. The Devil walks those woods. You speak of hearing the lonesome notes of a flute coming from the forest. Boys wandering away never to return—or if so, horribly altered. I am not one to jump at spooks, but there is much of this world we do not comprehend. That land is known only to the Red Indian, and perchance he possesses a savage means to cope with such deviltry. You do not. You are a white man, and civilized.

  Come home! Your ambitions are noble, but having already used up your inheritance on the erection of the School, you have, I fear, left yourself in a position of keen vulnerability. I would come myself, but my tubercular state has rendered me inert. Only heroic doses of laudanum keep the agonies at bay.

  Do not be so pigheaded, Auggie! If the boys will not come with you, leave them. They are runaways. That is their nature! Whether it be through cobbled side streets or into the dim woods, they run! I admire a streak of iron as much as any man, but there comes a time when that iron turns poisonous in the blood.

  Your latest missive . . . Auggie, do not take this wrongly, but if I had not recognized your handwriting I might have thought it had been misposted from the nuthatch up in Courtney Hills. You find yourself in a dark place—darkness of the spirit, a darkening of the heart. Why put your soul at peril? Leave, please. Take those charges who will come, abandon the rest. They are society’s leavings. Nobody shall place blame on you or mourn their passing. They have no kin.

  YOU have kin, Auggie. Me. Your loving brother. Come back to me. I beg of you. From the bottom of my heart I beg.

  Yrs as ever,

  Connie

  That was the final letter. The ones below bore postmarks from earlier dates. Minerva skimmed them, reading the odd snippet. The initial excitement and productivity at the Preston School appeared to have given way to creeping signs that became increasingly menacing. Sounds from the forest. The haunting trill of a flute.

  According to the letters, boys at the Preston School had started to disappear—or this was Minerva’s understanding based on Connie Preston’s one-sided narrative.

  The boys disappeared, but they came back. Just like Eli Rathbone? With his white hair and gray eyes and blanket of hissing bugs?

  In the second-to-last letter, Conrad Preston mentioned the desertion of the school’s guards, leaving Augustus as the lone authority. Minerva tried to picture Augustus and his delinquent boys stranded on this solitary outcropping. Yet throughout it all—to judge by Conrad’s increasingly desperate letters—Augustus maintained a fervent belief, even as events spiraled into madness. He was Ahab pursuing his white whale.

  “Jesus, Shug,” Minerva said. “Do you think . . . Is it possible that what’s happening at Little Heaven now has happened before? Nearly a hundred years ago?”

  Micah said, “I cannot say what is happening now.”

  “But if it did happen, how could nobody know about it?”

  “People go missing. Whole groups.”

  “But this many? Ten boys, maybe more, and their batshit-crazy warden?”

  “There are a million ways it could have happened.”

  “But I don’t think it happened any of those ways, Shug. I think it happened the way it’s happening at Little Heaven. And I think you do, too.”

  Night had begun to fold over the Preston School. Micah said, “Make a fire.”

  THEY FOUND A POTBELLIED STOVE in the kitchen. Micah hurled the mattress off Augustus Preston’s bed. He put his boots to the bed frame. The wood was hard oak. Micah was sweating by the time it started to splinter. He ripped the shattered wood f
rom the joists. When he had enough, he slit the mattress and ripped out handfuls of stuffing.

  He filled the stove with that cottony fluff, then tossed in bits of the bed frame. Before long, a fire was roaring. Micah seemed pleased. He must have found it cathartic to torch the bed of a blue-blooded sadist who had locked up little boys in boxes.

  Minerva hunted through the cupboards. Just crockery. A ringbolt was set in the kitchen floor. Pulling on it opened a trapdoor leading to the cold cellar.

  “Flashlight, Shug.”

  Micah handed it to her. She went down the worn steps. The cellar swept out under the flashlight’s glow. Ancient dust swirled in the flashlight beam.

  The shelves were stocked with preserves that had long gone off. Some of the mason jars had burst, their contents hanging off the edge of the shelf in stalactites—as if the shelves had grown fangs. The liquid had gone thin in other jars, the color of formaldehyde. Things sat suspended inside the liquid. Bulging shapes like beets or blackened turnips or . . . something. A jar of pickled eggs with some kind of weird flagellate tails attached to them . . .

  She swept the beam away from the jars. It fell upon something that puzzled her. Bars. Crosshatched iron bars. A square of them set into the center of the wall.

  It was a cage. A cell dug into the cellar clay. Four feet deep, maybe a foot and a half high. There were three of them, side by side, each fronted by a barred door. They were too small to admit a full-grown person.

  Minerva backed away. Her ass hit something. She spun to see a chair. A Chippendale? Brass rivets. Leather cracked over the years. It was then she realized that the cells had been dug at eye level, like . . . like pictures on a wall. Their occupants would have had to climb up into them—or, worse, they would have needed a boost.

  And someone must have sat in this very chair. Smoking a pipe, maybe sipping a brandy. Watching whoever was inside.