Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  “What I have for you is not hell,” the Long Walker told the man. “But for a brief while, it may feel something like it.”

  2

  THEY DROVE EAST in the lightening day. Micah had rented a Cadillac Coupe DeVille. White leather seats, mahogany dash, A/C, crimson trim, quadraphonic stereo system with an eight-track player. Its big-bore V-8 purred. It wasn’t the sort of vehicle he would normally drive, but it suited his doomsday demeanor. No use saving for a rainy day when your days were numbered.

  “You never moved far away, did you?” Minerva said from the backseat.

  Micah said, “It is where we settled. Ellen wanted it.”

  “That close? Practically living in the shadow of it?”

  Micah said, “Somebody had to.”

  They followed the road, letting it pull them back to the source. It felt almost like driving back through time: the last fifteen years washing away, putting them right where they had been . . . except they were older and more worn out and much more frightened than they had been all those years ago. They drove in silence for the most part, not listening to the radio even though the car speakers were top-of-the-line. The odometer clicked off the miles to Grinder’s Switch. They arrived early in the afternoon.

  They pulled into the same gas station where they had stocked up on provisions fifteen years ago.

  “I’ll wait here,” Eb said, stretching his bum leg out in the backseat.

  “Get you anything?” Micah asked.

  “A few bottles of Yoo-hoo, for consistency’s sake.”

  Micah stepped into the store with Minerva. It looked remarkably as it had, apart from the addition of two video game cabinets beside the newspaper racks: Asteroids and Pac-Man. Micah watched the little yellow character like a pie with a wedge cut out of it racing round its maze, wakka-wakka-wakka-wakka. What was the point? Ah God, he was old. A fogey. Petty had asked for an Atari system not long ago. Micah said he didn’t want to see her wasting her time. But it was the duty of the young to waste their time, seeing as they had so much of it.

  The man behind the counter was the same from years ago. He looked roughly a thousand years old. He wore dentures that pushed his lips apart, and his nose had been broken since Micah last set eyes on him. Micah bought Eb’s Yoo-hoos, some wooden matches, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of Wonder Bread. The clerk totaled up his purchases sullenly and put them in a paper sack. Minerva bought a quart of Dr Pepper and two Milky Ways.

  They returned to the car. Micah drove to the cut. The old trail was still there. Micah popped the trunk. They unloaded their gear: a rifle, sleeping gear, a lantern, and flashlights. Minerva handed Micah his backpack from the trunk. Its weight surprised her.

  “What you got in there, Shug? Pet rocks?”

  They shouldered their packs and made their way through the long grass to the head of the trail. They had to move slower on account of Ebenezer’s limp.

  The sun hung above the western hills, shining with a dull glow that cast no shadows. The air was still, but a sweet breath came from the woods rowing the hillside: a mild note of camphor. The twittering of birds, too: only a few, but at least some animals were about. The path followed a gradual rise. They could spot no signs of the old fire. Everything was thriving, in fact.

  Minerva twisted the cap off her Dr Pepper. Ebenezer broke into a commercial jingle as he limped along.

  “I drink Dr Pepper, don’t you see,” he sang in a redneck twang, “as it’s the perfect taste for meeeee . . .”

  “Whatever you paid for singing lessons, it was too much,” said Minerva.

  The two of them needled each other simply to hear themselves talk—anything to push away the silence, which had become heavier as they forged deeper into the woods.

  They stopped for a rest. The woods did not feel quite as hostile as they had fifteen years ago. Had they actually hurt the thing back then? Micah could not credit that. He wasn’t sure something like that could be injured or killed because he was unsure if it was truly alive. But more than that, it just seemed so ineffably old that, whenever Micah turned his mind to it (which was not often, because even his thoughts scared him), notions of it ever dying seemed farcical. Something like that existed outside the bounds of time and scale—outside human bounds, anyway, and those were the only measurements he could apply.

  “Are we ever going to talk about that part of it?” Minerva said. She must have read something in Micah’s face.

  “What part?” said Eb.

  “Whatever happened down there in the dark.”

  “With the . . . ?” Eb started.

  “Yeah, the . . .”

  Minerva trailed off. It was hard to say what, exactly, they had been given. Wishes? Is that what happened? Had they been granted wishes, like the old story about the genie in its bottle?

  “ ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ ” Eb said.

  Minerva nodded. “You read it?”

  “A few times,” said Eb. “Seems rather apt.”

  “But what . . .” Minerva grimaced, her brow beetling. “What did we ask for? I don’t remember saying anything. More just something kinda bubbling up from way down inside me. Something I must have wanted real bad. And that fucking thing granted it.”

  “Mine’s not so hard to figure,” Eb said. “I wished to see the face of God.”

  Ebenezer wiped his nose on his sleeve and took a sip of Yoo-hoo. He stared at them imploringly, as if hoping the other two would understand—intimately, in their marrow, knowing the way he knew. Ebenezer had been so desperately scared. Those moments, in that place beneath the world, had nearly broken him . . . or had broken him, in a way he was unable to unravel or give voice to or properly grapple with. Like a greenstick fracture of some invisible bone—a vestigial one, the bones we all had as children that fused and changed so that, as adults, we have a different number of them in our bodies. That phantom bone went snap. The cleave was clean and flawless, as if a surgeon had done the work with a bone hammer. And that little bone was unhealable—it was forever broken, the jagged ends grinding together inside his mind. Looking back, Ebenezer was unsure that human minds were built to cope with any of . . . of what happened down there. He felt no shame thinking that, either, as he did not believe humans were built to come to grips with anything that existed beyond their conventional means of reckoning. When humans experience something that challenges their fundamental belief of the world—its reasonableness, its fixed parameters—well, their minds crimp just a bit. A mind folds, and in that fresh pleat lives a darkness that cannot be explained or accounted for. So they ignore that pleat as best they can—it, and the darkness it holds. But it’s always there, always seeking redress.

  “I wanted to see the face of God,” Eb said again. “I must have. I was not a religious person, as you both know. I killed for money. But in that moment, all I wanted was to know there was something larger than myself up there—a benevolent god to protect me. If not my body, at least my immortal soul.”

  The men turned to Minerva. She spat into the nettles. Why even speak the words? They must know what she’d asked for: I will never be killed by the hand of a man. Minerva could not say that was her exact wish—she was still unsure, then as now, as to the precise compass of her desires. But look at her now. The past fifteen years. The Sharpening, that most terrible gift. She could kill and not be killed, even by her own hand, much as she might now pray for death. What worth were those prayers? She had made a deal with something as powerful, if earthbound, as any god. Perhaps it was a god of some sort. A dark one. An ancient one. But yes, she must have wished to be cleansed of the fear and anxiety she had once carried into life-or-death encounters. As Micah had said years back, she was not cool in the cut. Her hands always took fright, fluttering like startled chickadees. Minerva figured that was what the vile thing had dredged up. It found that flaw in her, one that shook her straight to her core, and whispered: Oh, my ladylove, my dove, I will make it all better. And it had, hadn’t it? As sure as eggs is eggs. But
it had played a dirty trick, too. Well, fuck a duck. You couldn’t expect a thing like that to play fair, could you?

  The light was fading between the firs. An owl hooted from a low bough.

  “And you, Shug?” Minerva said. “What did you get?”

  “Only everything I asked for.”

  THEY HIKED UNTIL DUSK. Ebenezer hissed every time he set his foot down. Minerva felt no sympathy for him.

  A shape broke through the trees ahead. They checked their strides, approaching cautiously. A solitary shack. Smoke spindled from its chimney. The door was ajar. Light from a potbellied stove threw flickering shadows across its interior.

  From inside, there came an ominous sound. Minerva envisioned someone sitting on a whoopee cushion filled with thinned lard: a wet spluttering.

  We don’t have to look, she thought edgily. We can walk right on by . . .

  Too late. Micah toed the door open. His eyes fell upon something inside. His knees buckled; he leaned heavily against the door frame. The spluttering sounds were much louder with the door open.

  In the firelight flickering through the door, Micah’s face was drawn and haunted. He drew a shuddering breath, then stepped into the shack. Ebenezer hesitantly followed, and quickly saw whatever Micah had beheld.

  “I can’t,” Eb said, shaking his head violently. “Oh Christ, no, I can’t, I cannot—”

  Borne on a sudsy foam of dread, Minerva advanced to the door. She didn’t want to see, either. But she couldn’t not bear witness.

  The cramped shack reeked of blood. The stove, a folding card table, pelts tacked on the walls. Something hung among those pelts—much larger than the coyote and muskrat skins, oh yes. And it was still moving. A paralyzing chill spread down her back, as if liquid nitrogen had been injected into her spinal column.

  A man was tacked to the wall. His bare feet kicked weakly six inches above the ground. He had been opened up, his chest split down the middle starting at the level of his clavicles. The skin was peeled back in quivering wings that had been pinned to the log walls with pelt tacks. The silverskin and fascia and yellow adipose tissues had been flensed away with clinical skill; whoever had done it had great facility with a boning knife. The man’s arms and legs had been slit down their middles, the skin peeled back to reveal the shining bone of femur and kneecap and humerus.

  Humerus? Minerva thought, her mind taking a sickening lurch. There’s not a damn thing humerus here—hey-o! Gimme a rim shot, Doc Severinsen!

  The flesh was slit back from his nose in petals, the strips tacked to the wood. The musculature of his face twitched, his eyes massive without anything to cover them; they peered around with a vaudevillian shock that forced a cascade of giddy giggles to bubble up Minerva’s throat. It was the only way to get rid of the chest-splintering pressure building up inside of her.

  It took a moment to grasp the final horror. The source of that spluttering.

  The man’s neck had been slit, but he was still breathing. The man’s lungs heaved, forcing breaths out, the air blllpphhphhph-ing from his severed windpipe. Minerva watched the erratic beat of his heart through the naked bones of his ribs; his innards still pushed stubborn shreds of food along.

  What infernal sorcery was keeping him alive? Was it the same that kept her own heart beating every time she tried to off herself?

  She grabbed a hatchet from the wall rack. She took two steps toward the man and brought it around in a wicked arc. It buried in the man’s neck, widening the slit. His body thrashed, blood spraying. She pried the blade out of the wall and swung it again and again until the man’s head was completely separated from his body: it hit the floor and rolled under the table like a lopsided bowling ball.

  Minerva stared at Micah, breathing hard. Her face was flecked with blood.

  “Merciful,” Micah said after a span.

  Noise from under the table. The man—no, the head—was laughing. The gibbering sounds of lunacy you might hear at a nuthatch.

  That laughter unseated something in Minerva—it filled her with panic and sorrow and, yes, rage. She kicked over the table and swung the hatchet at the giggling head. The blade cleaved the skull dead center, splitting the bone; there came a hiss as pressure forced a chunk of gray matter through. Minerva threw the stove open and hurled the head inside with the hatchet still embedded in it. The head continued to howl laughter, and the pitch ascended as its lips began to melt. Minerva slammed the stove door. Fire flared behind it; there came a small explosion as the juices inside the man’s head heated up, blowing out part of his skull. The giggling ceased.

  They gathered outside. Ebenezer collapsed against a fallen log.

  “How?” he asked helplessly.

  “It’s the work of that thing.” Minerva was doubled over, breathing in huge gulps. “The Big Thing. The Piper. Whatever you want to call it.”

  The smoke rising from the chimney now had a meaty smell.

  “I don’t know if I can go through with this,” Minerva said. “I thought I could, Shug, but . . .”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “I understand.”

  LATER, MICAH WALKED from the fire they had stoked a ways from the cursed shack. He stared through the trees in the direction of Little Heaven. They weren’t far now. It would all come to an end of sorts. He was ready for that. He had one last fight in him—and if he had to, he would fight alone. Petty was his blood; in the end tally, neither Minerva nor Ebenezer owed him a debt. Their ledgers were clean with him.

  But Petty—yes, he owed her. A parent always does. He stared into the formless dark, and a memory molded itself within it. Petty was young at the time, two or three years old. This was before Ellen entered her endless sleep. But that day she wasn’t with them; it had been Micah and his daughter, alone. He’d been working in the paddocks when he spotted a caterpillar—a big brown one wriggling along, doing its caterpillary thing. He called Petty over and drew her attention to it.

  “Touch it,” he said. “It is . . . fuzzy.”

  Micah simply wanted her to feel the soft, bristling, undulating little carpet of fuzz that is a caterpillar. Pet put her finger on it and pressed down. She wasn’t big in human terms, but to a caterpillar she was gargantuan. The caterpillar curled into a ball. He snatched Pet’s hand away. “Gentle.” She gazed at him with no comprehension. Micah thought the caterpillar would be okay—it had just turtled up defensively. It would uncurl once the threat was gone. But the wind picked up and blew the caterpillar across the boards, light as a dried seedpod, in a way that told Micah the life had drained out of it. It happened so quickly. A thing was alive; next it was dead. Petty lost interest and ran off after her ball. Micah stared at the caterpillar a long time. It was the first thing his daughter had killed that he was aware of. Micah had guided her to the act. And yet life went on. It always did. Pet was chasing a ball. The birds were singing. The horses nickered in their stables.

  You tell yourself it’s just a caterpillar. The world’s full of them. Which is true. But the world is full of us, too. And any of us can be lost—or taken—at any minute.

  Micah thought about endings. Some were abrupt, like the way that caterpillar’s life had ceased. Some took longer, and you could see them coming from miles off. In so many ways, Micah wanted it to end. He felt every one of his years. He was old and bone-weary. His body ached; his mind was plagued. Everything he loved had been ripped from him, and he deserved it. Guilt and regret were different qualities, yes, but still tightly wed. You could not outrun your past. Your history was a lonely hound pursuing you over field and fallow, never resting, always hungry, tracking you relentlessly until one night you heard its nails scratching at your door.

  I am coming, Pet, he thought. Please just hold on a little longer. If I can, you can.

  1

  NATE WAS STILL AWAKE. Everyone else was asleep.

  Only a few hours had passed since the one-eyed man had come back. He and Mr. Redhill and Mr. Fairweather and Mr. La
ngtree had gone off in the truck to get help. They hadn’t made it far. In fact, they were still within earshot when Nate heard Mr. Redhill start to scream. He thought it had been Mr. Redhill, anyway. It was too dark to see, the truck too far away by then, and anyway, when people scream—even full-grown men—they all tend to sound the same. That wasn’t something Nate would have guessed, but he could say so now. Only the one-eyed man had returned to Little Heaven alive.

  Now Nate was in the mess hall with his father, the three outsiders, and Ellen—she had told him her name, so she wasn’t an outsider to him anymore. A bigger group was over in the supply warehouse. A few stragglers were standing watch at the gate.

  After the one-eyed man came back, a lot of people tried to get into the chapel. Sanctuary was the word Nate had heard. But the chapel was locked. The Reverend wouldn’t answer his door, either. What did it matter? Nobody cared what the Reverend had to say now. It’s about time, Nate thought. He had never really liked Reverend Flesher. He reminded Nate of a door-to-door salesman: he spread out his wares on your living room rug, and they weren’t much good, all scuffed and cheaply made, but he pressured you to buy them anyway. Nate was glad the Reverend had lost some of his control. Nate could say that now, couldn’t he? Sure. He could say or think almost anything. And that was a scary thought.

  Everyone had questions for the one-eyed man, too. A lot of those questions had been screamed into the one-eyed man’s face, and they were less questions than accusations. He didn’t answer any of them. It was as if whatever had happened out there had temporarily melted his brain. That was a scary thought, too, because the one-eyed man seemed tough. Steel-belted, his mom would say. If whatever had happened out there was bad enough to do that to him, Nate figured it had to be really bad.

  One thing was for sure: nobody wanted to step past the gates. The only thing they could do was take cover and wait until morning. Everyone was praying that whatever was in the woods—the things that had killed Mr. Langtree and Mr. Fairweather and Billy and Elton’s dad—wouldn’t enter Little Heaven. It was whispered that they must be afraid of the lights—but with the gasoline dwindling, who knew how much longer the lights would stay on.