by Nick Cutter
This was the smart bet, and the shrewdest move Amos could make under the circumstances. His flock was already suspicious of the outsiders—Cyril and Virgil had overheard their whispers, and filtered them back to him. It would be an easy pill to swallow; they wanted to swallow it. He watched their faces. Sweat trickled down his neck and soaked his collar. He had worked hard, so hard, for years to put these people under his yoke. They trusted him . . . or they had until just lately.
One by one their faces began to reflect this. They began to believe. Yes. Of course. The evil lurked, as it always did, in the hearts of men. And the four outsiders had come from far away, bringing a terrible curse with them. They were the devil’s Trojan horse. Little Heaven had accepted and sheltered them, only to be poisoned by them. The Reverend’s people needed a target to channel their rage and fear into. All Amos had to do was provide one.
“Get them,” he said.
EBENEZER OBSERVED the morning’s proceedings with a gathering sense of doom.
He’d leapt out of bed when those agonized screams shattered the calm. He landed on both feet. His ankle was quite a bit better. He could put almost his full weight on it. He and Ellen watched people gather in front of the Reverend’s place. He opened the door and listened. Ellen was at his elbow.
“Oh God,” she whispered when they overheard the Little Heavenites tell the Reverend about the new missing kids. But her nephew was safe. Eb saw the boy standing beside his stoop-shouldered loaf of a father.
Ellen told Eb that she wanted to help with the search of the compound.
“You should, if only to show your empathy,” he said. “But I can’t go.”
“Why not?”
“My ankle.”
“You’re fine,” Ellen said. “You’re walking on it now.”
“Yes, but I don’t want them to know that.”
“Why not?”
Ebenezer thought about quoting Sun Tzu but thought better of it. Ellen said, “Fine, do whatever you want,” and began to pull her boots on. But then Virgil—the more moronic of the Reverend’s two lapdogs—showed up.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he announced.
“Why not?” said Ellen.
“Reverend’s orders.”
After that, the compound was searched. The kids were not found. Worshippers rounded back into the square. Ebenezer listened at the shut door, trying to catch what the Reverend was saying.
“I believe this stands to end poorly for us,” he said to Ellen.
They watched out the bunkhouse window. The Reverend pointed in their direction. A group of supplicants began to stalk toward them. Next, the door swung open and the denizens of Little Heaven poured in.
A red-faced man rushed Eb. He kicked the man in the knee. The man screamed and twisted aside, but another man steamed in behind him and clocked Ebenezer spang in the face. Jesus! Wasn’t very Christian, was it? Ebenezer reeled to see Ellen crushed under a weight of bodies. She was being dragged outside. The man who’d slugged Ebenezer came at him again—big, with a baleful glare in his eyes. The father of the missing girl, Eb was pretty sure. He pinned Ebenezer’s arms to his sides; Eb brought a knee up into his gut. Eb felt slightly bad doing so, the man’s agonies being what they were. Undeterred, the menfolk of Little Heaven hurled themselves at him. Ebenezer tagged a few others with solid shots as they rushed him, but ultimately they got him down, hit him until he could taste his own blood, and hauled him into the harsh morning sunshine.
“You took the children,” the Reverend said. “The four of you planned it, and the other two executed it. They are holding them now, aren’t they? You thought that we wouldn’t catch you out? The Lord has laid your plans bare.”
“Why would we take them?” Eb spat blood. “That makes no sense. Can’t you see that?”
What did these people think they were—a roaming quartet of kidnappers combing the woods for isolated camps so they could poach children? It wasn’t logical, but Eb knew logic had a way of dissolving in circumstances like this. Fear and worry ate into reason like acid, making the most ludicrous possibilities seem plausible.
“Oh, but isn’t the devil a coy liar?” The Reverend’s lips fleered into a manic grin. “The father of lies! Do you think you could prey on our most innocent ones? Did you think the Lord and His humble servants would not strike you down for your vile trespasses?”
“How did nobody hear?” Eb said. “Three kids are gone—”
“Four,” said the Reverend. “Eli Rathbone is missing again, too.”
A strangled moan from somewhere in the crowd at this news.
“Snatched from his bed like the others,” the Reverend plowed on. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”
“Four kids gone,” Eb said, swallowing the blood collecting in the back of his throat, “and nobody heard anything? How could that be?”
The Reverend said, “Satan has his ways. His minions, too.”
A voice broke out of the crowd. “Where is Cyril?”
The worshippers peeled back. Otis Langtree stood there, flanked by Charlie Fairweather. They were caked in trail dust, wearing backpacks. Eb figured they had just recently rounded back into the compound.
The Reverend stood stunned, a wristwatch stopped midtick. “What?”
“Cyril,” Otis repeated. “Your man.”
“You two left the compound,” said the Reverend with a leaden swallow. “Isn’t that right? You left with the other outsiders. Where did you go?”
“They wanted to get their gear,” said Otis. “From their campground. We guided them back. We would’ve been back sooner, but we got turned around.” He bit the inside of his cheek. “Lost all track of time. Hours that neither one of us can account for. Something’s gone real screwy in those woods, Reverend.”
“And the first thing we noticed coming back is that Cyril, he ain’t standing watch over Eli’s quarters like he was the other night.” Charlie squinted at Amos Flesher—a bold, assessing glance. “Is he still here, Reverend—Cyril, I mean? He anywhere about?”
Weird voltages raced under the Reverend’s face. “I . . . He should be—”
Ebenezer watched the scene unfold with keen interest. It was happening fast, but then the balance, when it swung, often did so swiftly—
“Reverend?” said Otis. “If Cyril’s not anywhere to be found . . .” A meaningful pause, with a nod to Eb and Ellen. “With all due respect, I think you might have chased the wrong dog here. I’m not certain these are your culprits.”
The congregants murmured among themselves. Charlie and Otis were two of the most respected persons at Little Heaven.
Reverend Flesher’s eyes went hard. “The Lord has spoken to me, Brother Langtree. These are His words.”
Otis’s head dropped . . .
No! thought Ebenezer. Don’t let him cow you! Be a man for once in your goddamn life!
Then, slowly, Otis’s head rose again.
Bloody good show! There’s the iron in that spine!
“Reverend, I’ve been with you for many years,” Otis said. “I followed you and I’m going to keep on following. But I think this one time you got your signals crossed up.”
Another murmur raced through the throng, an electric one this time. Dissent, discord. Ebenezer felt a shifting of the tide—a physical, almost visual swing, like the bubble in a carpenter’s level.
“We’ve been with those other two,” said Charlie. “The outsiders. We took them back to their camp, like I said. We left them many miles shy of Little Heaven. But they ain’t running away. They aim to return. I don’t forecast they should arrive much before dark, if so at all tonight.”
“All that’s to say, they were nowhere near here last night,” said Otis.
“And these two,” said Charlie, with a nod at Eb and Ellen. “They been in their bunkhouse all this time, ain’t that right?”
The Reverend’s face shaded pig-belly pink. Eb could practically see the gears inside his skull burning out in stinking puffs of smoke
.
“All things considered, I think Cyril might be your man,” said Otis.
“You take that back!” Virgil said tremblingly.
Otis ignored him. “It might not have been Cyril. Snatching four kids right out of their beds, quiet as a whisper? That’d be a tough job for a whole team of men. So . . . it could have been something else.”
“What else could it be?” the mother of the missing boys said despairingly.
Charlie shot Otis an angry look. “Nothing,” Charlie said. “It’s not worth talking about now. We have to search the woods,” he went on, not looking at the Reverend.
“In groups,” Otis stressed. “Four or five people to a search party.”
“And if we don’t find them by midafternoon, we send a delegation out to get a proper search team,” said Charlie. “Helicopters, sniffer dogs, and whatnot.”
“I second that idea, Brother Fairweather,” said the missing girl’s mother. “Oh please, let’s do that.”
The fathers of the missing children nodded to each other. One of them went over and helped Ellen up. Another man hauled Ebenezer to his feet. There were no apologies—they couldn’t quite bring themselves to do that, not in front of the Reverend. That small kindness rendered, the men and their wives headed toward the gates. Otis and Charlie followed behind them.
“We’ll pitch in,” Ebenezer called after them.
Charlie accepted the offer with a nod. Eb and Ellen began to make their way toward the gates, too. The remaining worshippers stepped aside to let them pass.
“But you can’t . . . ,” Eb heard the Reverend say.
Only a few had stayed with Reverend Flesher: Doc Lewis, Nate’s father, an unidentified man with the carbuncled face of a toad, and the cook.
“The Lord will punish you!” Flesher shouted. “Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God!” His voice rose to an impotent screech, his face knotted in rage. “The Almighty shall smite you for flouting the word of His earthbound prophet!”
“Oh, shut up, you twat,” Ebenezer muttered, and kept going.
32
MICAH AND MINERVA arrived back at Little Heaven with dusk coming on. In the waning light, they could see torches burning between the trees.
“Not again,” said Minerva. “Please no.”
Their return had been remarkably uneventful. When the morning sun washed over the Preston School, the field lay empty. Maybe the creatures had an aversion to daylight, because they were nowhere to be seen. Micah and Minny hiked through the day, talking little, and made it back in time to hear the shouts ringing out from the woods surrounding the compound. Names being called in hoarse, frightened voices.
They walked through Little Heaven’s main gates, which had been left unguarded. Was everyone out in the woods? A generator chugged sluggishly, powering the overhead spots—but Micah couldn’t help noticing that the bulbs flickered, blinking out for half a second before burning again. His eye roamed over the compound under the faltering lights, settling on the windowless bunkhouse that the boy Eli had been held in. Neither Cyril nor Virgil was occupying the guard post. He walked over. A busted padlock lay near the door. He turned the knob. The door opened into a small room. The smell was foul. The bed was empty, but there was a gluey stain on the mattress.
“How bad do you figure things are?” said Minerva, joining him.
Micah said, “Bad.”
They dropped their packs off at their bunkhouse. Their weapons they kept. Finding nobody about, Micah wandered to the edge of Little Heaven while Minerva changed into fresh clothes.
The children’s playground sat forlorn in the dusk. Micah sat on one of the swings and watched the torches bob through the forest. The sky was the red of a blood blister, the sun’s final rays pooling behind the trees. He had never been scared of nightfall. Even as a child, he’d welcomed the darkness. But bad things tended to happen at night in Little Heaven. Those same terrible things might happen in the day, too, soon enough. But at least they would be able to see them coming.
Ellen Bellhaven appeared on the other side of the fence. Her clothes were smudged with dirt and sap.
“Hey,” she said to Micah.
“Hey.”
She entered through the gates and sat on the swing beside him. Her eyes were encircled by dark rings like washers. A goose egg sat high on her forehead.
“Were you hit?” Micah said.
She nodded. Rage flared inside him. She put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m fine,” she said, and related the morning’s events. Micah closed his eye and rocked on the swing.
“How many this time?”
“Three children. Two brothers and a little girl,” Ellen said. “And Eli’s gone again, too. We’ve been searching all day. I’m worried.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t see things getting any better.”
“No.”
“This isn’t about Nate anymore. We should all get out. Every person here.”
“There was a chance we could have. But now . . . the kids.”
Ellen nodded. “We can’t leave without them. It would be . . .” She sighed. “Hate to use the word, but it would be un-Christian of us.”
“The Reverend?”
“I don’t know how much power his word holds anymore,” Ellen said. “People are scared, Micah. Really, really scared.”
Micah felt that fear seeping out of the woods, where all of Little Heaven was searching for those kids. He could almost smell it coming out of Ellen’s pores, too. He had known that fear himself, years ago. It was kindling in him again now.
Fear finds a home in you. That was a lesson Micah had learned at some price. It finds the softest spots imaginable and sets up residence. That place behind your knees where the nerves bundle up, buckling them. Inside your lungs, pinching the air out of them. Within your head, spreading like fungus. Fear will make you abandon those you care for, even those you claim to love—the people you tell yourself you’d save, sacrificing your body for theirs, if it ever came to that. And hypothetically, yes, you would . . . at least in those dream scenarios we all concoct. The burning houses, the crazed gunmen. You’d risk that heat or take that bullet. In a man’s fantasies, he always does the right thing.
But sometimes a man must face the absolute reality of his fear. And he’ll discover that terror can chew him up and turn him into something else. A monster of wrath, or of cowardice. That man finds himself inhabiting the skin of a total stranger . . . except not really. It is the creature he becomes in the pressure cooker. Fear can warp a man. Turn him into a repellent specimen whom he never thought he could be, not in a million years.
Micah knew. He’d seen it. He’d lived it.
In the summer of 1953, a month before the war ended, Micah had found two American soldiers torturing a Korean POW. The incident was being overseen by Captain Luker Beechwood, Micah’s commander. Beechwood was the classic southern dandy. The sort of man whose father drank sweet tea on the porch of the plantation manor where his forebears had had their slaves whipped in the dooryard.
The POW was a kid, eighteen. He was strapped to a chair with baling twine inside an isolated shack on the edge of their encampment. The soldiers were busily cutting pieces of skin off his chest and arms. The POW’s trousers were soaked with blood, and snot was bubbling out of his nose.
“We’re just letting some air into him, Private,” Captain Beechwood told Micah.
The soldiers were from Micah’s unit. One was Lyle Sykes. Fat, suffering from trench foot. He had a furtive and rattish air despite his girth. He was the sort of soldier whose skull you considered clandestinely putting a bullet into, out of the sense that he was somehow more dangerous than the enemy. Declan Hooper was the other man. A good egg. Micah was not surprised to see Sykes at the scene of this atrocity, but Hooper was a shock.
A sack sat at Captain Beechwood’s feet. Inside, Micah caught the gleam of wire cutters, a hammer, so
me nails. The air was hot inside the shack, filled with the reek of blood.
Micah said: “This is not to code.”
Micah was twenty. He had grown up rough, and by then had done some rough business himself. But what was happening in the shack had nothing to do with the war. Micah understood that Beechwood and the other two men could have as easily done the same to a US soldier if they thought they could get away with it.
“Private Shughrue,” Beechwood said in his plummy southern twang, “this man has information of a vital nature. We are simply endeavoring to extract it.”
Micah regarded them. Sykes, beefy and beady-eyed. Hooper, looking like a boy caught filching dimes from his mother’s purse. But what Micah recalled powerfully was a personal dryness: his own fear leeched the moisture out of his eyes and nose and mouth, his veins running thick as if his blood had been mixed with flour.
“You cannot,” he said more firmly.
Beechwood smiled. “We are, and we will.”
With that, Micah hit his CO in the face. Beechwood’s nose cracked and he fell back with a squawk. The Korean soldier moaned. Hooper and Sykes came on next, clouting Micah with closed fists. Micah fought back, but one of them clipped his chin and sent him crashing to the ground. Beechwood had recovered by then. They all put it to him, stomping his skull with their heavy mud-caked boots.
“Enough,” Beechwood announced, panting. “We’ll kill him. Can’t get away with that.”
They dragged Micah to the brig, where he was imprisoned for assaulting his commanding officer. One month in a lightless cell, fed bread teeming with lice. By the time he got out, Captain Beechwood and the others had shipped out. He never knew what became of the Korean soldier.
Once home, Micah nursed fantasies of hunting Beechwood down and doing to his former commander what Beechwood had done to the Korean. But Micah’s tendency to square the scales was not so strong then. And anyway, some part of him understood the impulse. The three of them had been scared deep in their souls. Fear manifested in terrible ways, especially during wartime. It shows a man the face he didn’t know he had. Later Sykes and Hooper might have been remorseful—Hooper especially—waking with nightmares about what they had done. Beechwood, probably not. All men are built to different tolerances. Put in identical straits, they react differently. And those who act rightly despite that crawling fear cast shame upon those who cave in to it.