by Nick Cutter
He was up the fence now. He’d scaled it like a blackie up a coconut tree, hadn’t he? Climbed it faster than that fairy English nigger ever could. Cyril paused, his body trembling, then started to crawl through the razor wire. Oh fuck. Stop. STOP! The wire was studded with long sharp blades just like the ones his father used to shave with. They effortlessly slit Cy’s clothes. Blood leapt out in greedy bursts.
He kept his eyes on Carlene. That traffic-stopping body. Those inhuman eyes. What would she do to him with that body—more important, what would she do with those eyes?
A razor raked his throat. Blood pissed out his neck, a shiny redness spritzing against the night. Fuck it all to hell. He didn’t even feel it. Carlene’s hands were moving between her legs, fingers feathering that space between. Her breasts were so big—way bigger than he ever remembered, though he was an ass man by trade—so big they threw round shadows down her rib cage.
There came the sound of a wet, shredding, rubbery fart—Cyril almost yelped laughter. Sweet Jesus, someone just ripped their britches! A real denim-burster. Except he knew that wasn’t it. In a far-off, unreal, daydreamy sense, he understood that some other part of his anatomy was responsible for that noise. It was the sound of something opening up, and something else slipping out. In some distant chamber of his mind—which sat beside a second chamber where something small and helpless gibbered in mindless fear—he realized that he also had a thudding erection.
A stiffie, as they were called. A peg-pounder. A cunt-corker. A bon—
He saw someone else now. Standing behind Carlene. A bigger shape. Tall. Pale. Kind of pear-shaped.
Playing some kind of musical instrument. A flute, was it?
Cyril was halfway through the razor wire. It was slicing him to ribbons. Who cared? It was good. He would go to Carlene and she would fix him. With her lips and tongue and tits and her perfect pink pussy. Her love. More than anything, that’s what Cy needed. The love of a good woman. That’s why he’d gone wayward. Followed the bad path. But he’d change all that. Him and Carlene together.
Cy jerked his leg. There was a long cold sizzle down his calf, and then that leg was free. He climbed down the other side of the fence. He felt heavy all over: the soddenness of his clothes, sopping with blood, plus a bricklike heaviness of mind. But it would be over soon. It would be fucking beautiful.
He staggered toward Carlene. The lights of Little Heaven reduced until there was no light at all. When he spun, laughing a little, he couldn’t see the chapel or bunkhouses. Just that vast darkness peering back at him.
Who gave a flying fuck, anyway? He had Carlene. Jesus, he’d treated her bad, hadn’t he? He’d been young. An animal. Could you fault him? Any creature is only the sum of its instincts and interests, right? But Cy could change. She could declaw him. He’d be okay to stand for that now. He’d be a kitten for her. He’d curl right up in her lap.
Dimly, so dimly now, Cyril understood that he was dead. Or he would be soon, in a way he had never imagined. The human mind lacks a capacity to embrace such oddities of fate. He was a mess, woozy as blood leaked out of him from a dozen fleshy rips. He smiled, the dopey grin of a child. But a small, helpless voice, locked in the deepest cells of his brain, continued to scream without ceasing.
And Carlene was right fucking there. Just . . . bam! Ripe as a plucked peach. The years peeled away and they were both young again. Wouldn’t that be just the best? To live forever as you once were, back when you could run half a mile at a dead sprint, drink a six-pack, and then fuck like a rabbit? Yeah, that was the ticket!
She opened her arms. The flute’s music rose to a weird pitch that made his ears itch.
“Carlene . . .”
Baby . . .
Carlene’s face started to change. To bubble and run and worse things—
Oh, so so much worse.
Which was when Cyril Neeps began to scream for real, and for a long, long time. But of course, not one soul in Little Heaven heard a thing.
30
ELI’S BACK.
Nate awoke lathered in sweat, clutching his belly as if he’d been stabbed. These two words echoed within his mind.
Nate got up. The bunkhouse floor was icy on his bare feet. He went to the window. The moon was a ghost behind a smear of thin night clouds. A security lamp burned weakly; yesterday Nate had overheard that gasoline was running low, so the generators were running at half power.
Wind licked through paper-thin slits around the window frame. Nate shivered. He clenched his jaw. Stop it. Don’t be a baby. He glanced at his father, who slept with a pinched look on his face.
Distantly, Nate heard the notes of a flute. Thin, high notes that held no melody—more the random, inharmonious notes the wind might make as it blew through a dry reed. Yet there was something compelling about the sound. Frighteningly so.
Nate moved toward the bunkhouse door. He was barely aware he was doing it. His arms were overtaken by the numbness he’d felt when a dentist stuck a needle in his gums before filling a cavity. His hand was wrapped around the doorknob—he looked at his fingers clasping it and thought, Huh, isn’t that weird?
It took an enormous effort, summoned from a part of his brain he had never accessed, to activate his other hand and hook his fingers to the window frame. Grindingly, teeth set, he dragged himself back to the window. His fingers pulled away from the doorknob, which felt as warm as a penny clutched in a hot fist.
“Daddy . . . ,” he whispered in a hoarse rasp. His father did not stir.
Nate stared out at the compound. Just shadows, shifting and swirling . . .
He’s back.
Eli Rathbone. Nate saw him. Nate knew it was Eli, even though he didn’t look much like his old self. Eli didn’t really look human anymore.
The bold strokes were still there, sure. Eli had two arms, two legs. But everything else was off. That was one of his mom’s pet words. The old man who sat in the public park watching kids play with hungry eyes was off. The neighborhood boy who used to walk down the sidewalk after a rainstorm eating every wriggling worm he could find was off. You know off when you see it, his mom used to say.
Eli Rathbone was naked, his skin white as the chalk dust they spread on the base paths at the ball diamond. He radiated a sick glow, like those deep-sea fish whose bodies produce their own light. He was so skinny now that Nate could see each of his ribs, even the short one at the bottom. His head was just a skull covered in onionskin. His arms were elongated, the arms of an orangutan. He did not seem to walk so much as float—
He ghosted across the compound under the sputtering light of the security lamps. Shadows pooled under his feet—shadows that seemed to bristle with a powerful intensity, like a collection of tiny individual shadows all huddled together.
That flute music zephyred through the air. Each note bristled with an intensity that quilled the hairs on Nate’s neck. He wished he hadn’t woken up. A helplessness rose up in him, this sense that he and everyone else in Little Heaven had been tricked. Though he could not articulate it, he felt the same way an animal in a snare must feel as the trapper’s footsteps approached through the glen.
Eli’s head swiveled. His eyes pinned Nate. Eli’s eyes were black as tar. Nate felt totally naked, as if his body had been touched with a powerful spotlight. Eli smiled. His teeth were all gone. His skin sagged. It was the smile of a million-year-old infant.
Eli passed out of sight beyond the edge of the bunkhouse that belonged to the Rasmussen family. John and Anna and their daughter, Elsa, who had been nice to Nate when he first showed up. That ended when she started to play the games dreamed up by Eli and the Redhill brothers. All the children had slowly given themselves over to cruelty. It was like watching a sickness spread. And now everyone was infected.
He stood at the window for a span of pulseless seconds. Then he went to his father’s bed.
“Dad,” he said. “Get up.”
He shook his father. His dad’s eyes stayed closed, a clenched expressio
n fixed on his face.
“Dad, come on, please.”
His father mumbled and rolled over. Nate returned to the window. A squalid darkness overhung Little Heaven. Nothing moved. Not a single insect buzzed around the exterior lamps. Then—
They came around the edge of the Rasmussens’ bunkhouse.
Eli Rathbone came first, followed by Elsa Rasmussen. Then the Redhill boys, Elton and Billy. Linked hand to hand to hand. Elsa wore pajamas with a pattern of umbrellas. Billy and Elton only wore their underwear, their undeveloped chests pocked in gooseflesh. They did not walk so much as skip, as if they were playing some school-yard game.
One-two, skip to my Lou—skip to my Lou, my darlin’ . . .
They passed under the spotlight. They weren’t just holding hands—their skin was melted together like sticks of wax heated with a Zippo, then pressed together. An ugly mess of flesh welded into a distended knot. They skipped along, Eli leading, toward a spot in the fence where the darkness collected in a narrow slit.
As one, their heads swiveled in perfect unison to Nate. His groin went tight, then seemed to splinter apart, little terror-spiders scuttling up and down through his body, turning his knees to jelly and shooting pins and needles down his fingertips.
Dreamily, in a state of near-paralyzing horror, Nate backed away from the window. He went to his father again.
“Dad!” he said, finding his voice. “Wake up! Wake up!”
Nate’s fingers clawed into his father’s neck. He shook him as hard as he could. He would sink his teeth into his father’s shoulder next—anything to rouse him.
“Wuzza?” his father said, his voice thick with sleep.
“Get up! GET UP!”
Reggie sat up. The fear in Nate’s voice must have penetrated his fogged brain.
“What, Nate?”
“Come look,” he said, hauling on his father’s arm. “Please. Quick.”
“Nate, what is the matter with you?”
His father gazed at Nate with a look of confused apathy. His father had never been the most independent thinker—after his near-death experience, he’d become fond of phrases like The Lord’s will governs all things—but now he too often wore this deeply bewildered expression. It made Nate angry: his father had checked his brain at the gates of Little Heaven, which left Nate to make the grown-up decisions.
“Get UP!”
Obediently, Nate’s father followed him to the window. Eli and the others were almost out of sight as they skipped into the widening dark.
“Look!” Nate said, pointing.
His father followed Nate’s finger. Then his eyes did a funny thing. They went kind of soapy and retracted into their sockets like a turtle’s head tucking into its shell.
“Look at what?”
His voice seemed to come from the corner of the bunkhouse instead of his mouth. Nate gazed at him with a mixture of shock and disbelief.
“That’s Eli, Dad. Eli and Elsa Rasmussen and the Redhills, Elton and Billy. Can’t you see them, Dad? Right there?”
His father laughed—the laugh of a person desperately trying to find the humor in something that isn’t funny at all: a car crash or a public execution or a yellowy old body toppling out of its casket at a funeral.
“There’s nothing out there, Nate. You’re imagining things.”
His father wouldn’t look at him. Nate’s disbelief shaded into dread as a sinister realization began to dawn on him.
Either his father couldn’t actually see what Nate was seeing—some protective part of his brain had switched on, erasing the four gruesome children from his sight . . .
Or else—and this possibility was unspeakably worse—they were seeing the exact same thing, only his father was either too terrified or too cowardly to acknowledge it.
“Oh, Dad. Dad, please—”
“There’s nothing out there,” his father said robotically. “Not a thing.”
A profound desolation settled over Nate. He felt alone in a way he had never thought possible. He might as well be at the farthest reaches of the universe, at the point where all light died.
“Go back to bed, Nate. You’re being silly.”
His father turned—Nate got the sense of his dad’s body as a tightly coiled spring on the verge of snapping. He ruffled Nate’s hair. His fingers were hard and his nails too long; it was like being raked with sharp twigs. He lay down on his bed, his back to Nate.
Nate’s gaze fled to the window. Eli and the others had vanished. But he could see something in that rip of darkness. Just an outline.
A figure. Far too tall to be human. Long-legged and long-armed, with a giant cask belly. It capered and jigged with evident merriment. Smaller shapes, children-sized ones, danced around it. The discordant melody of the flute cut through the night.
The shape retreated. The smaller shapes followed it into the wooded dark.
31
AMOS FLESHER AWOKE to the sounds of his empire crumbling.
He was unceremoniously hauled out of a contented sleep—a dream where the world was covered with living black oil and he had the only rowboat. The Voice bubbled up from the oil, whispering and hissing . . .
Next: hysterical shouts. Names hollered over and over.
“Elsa! Elsa!”
“Billy! Elton!”
“Oh God! Oh God, it’s happened again!”
“ELLLLLLSAAAAAA!”
Next: rapping on his door.
“Reverend!”
He opened the door only to be confronted with the agonized faces of several worshippers. Maude and Terry Redhill, the Rasmussens, a few more.
“She’s gone!” Anna Rasmussen screamed. “Our baby girl!”
Worshippers were streaming into the square by then, their faces bloated with sleep. The Reverend’s mind whirled as he processed the situation, calculating the new configuration of things and finding his own angle within it.
“Calm down,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”
“She’s gone!” Anna Rasmussen screamed, harpyishly. “Our daughter! Her bed was empty this morning!”
“And Billy and Elton’s, too,” said Terry Redhill.
Amos’s mind clicked and ratcheted. “You’re telling me—”
“Reverend! They’re gone!” Maude Redhill spat. “They’ve been taken just like Eli Rathbone got took!”
Everyone watched the Reverend. Amos was struck by how sick they all looked: their bodies withered, their postures sunken. Their weakness made him ill. His gaze twigged on Reggie Longpre and his son. There was something in their faces he couldn’t intuit and didn’t entirely care for.
“Have the grounds been searched?” he said. “Every nook, every cranny?”
Nobody spoke. The Reverend sensed their collective uncertainty and needled through that gap.
“Search the compound!” he said. “Everyone, now! They could be hiding somewhere. A game to them.”
“It’s not a game!” shouted Anna. “They’re gone! Taken into the woods! Gone just like Eli and Eli’s parents!”
“We don’t know that, Sister Rasmussen. I understand that you’re—”
“We should have left—all of us! As soon as Eli went missing and then came back . . . came back . . .”
His worshippers’ faces reflected a vaporous panic—now laced with a hint of resentment directed toward Amos himself. He must step nimbly here.
“Search the grounds,” he said emphatically. “I must confer with the Lord our God, seeking His guidance.”
The worshippers reluctantly dispersed. Anna Rasmussen glanced over her shoulder at him—a poisonous, hateful glare. Amos pictured his hands closing around her throat and tightening until her eyes filled with blood . . .
“Cyril’s gone, too.”
Amos turned to find Virgil Swicker standing beside him.
“What?”
“Cy.” Virgil looked spooked. “Can’t find him anywhere.”
The Reverend’s mouth filled with bitter saliva. He could barely co
ntain the nervous energy building inside of him; he wanted to scream to let it free.
“If he’s not there, then who is watching the boy?”
Off Virgil’s stunned silence, Amos started across the square at a fast clip. He had to restrain himself from breaking into a run. Virgil tagged along on his heels. He reached the bunkhouse where Eli Rathbone was being held. Cyril’s chair was empty. Amos took a deep breath and unfastened the padlock.
The bunkhouse was empty. Only the fetid stink of the boy’s now absent body remained. Amos closed and locked the door again.
“You keep your mouth shut,” he said to Virgil, who nodded in docile assent.
Amos needed a plan. Quickly. He sized up his options.
One, they could abandon Little Heaven. But if the children really were missing, nobody would agree to that with the little bastards still lost in the woods . . .
Two, they could accuse someone of taking all four children. A scapegoat, or scapegoats. By Amos’s count, there were two possibilities. He cocked his head, as if to catch the strident bleating of the goats best suited to his purposes—those whose necks could be most easily slit.
“Go to the outsiders’ quarters,” he said. “Do not let them leave.”
A FRANTIC SEARCH ENSUED. The compound was scoured. The children were not found. By the time the worshippers returned to the square, Amos was ready.
“I held palaver with the Lord,” he said. “And I heard His Voice, clear and unfiltered.”
The faces of the worshippers changed: they went from fearful, perhaps even slightly mistrustful, to enrapt—even that bitch Anna Rasmussen, with her hopeful red-rimmed eyes. They wanted answers. Which was all people like them ever wanted. Any answer at all, so they didn’t have to think on their own.
“The evil comes from outside,” he said. “From those not pure of heart or spirit. We opened our door to them, as good and God-fearing folk must, and they have repaid our kindness with malice of the deepest and most hateful nature.”
He pointed at the bunkhouse shared by the English faggot and the burn-faced woman.
“Them. They are the evil that has come as a plague upon us.”