Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  Now everyone had split up and made their way either to the warehouse or the mess. The watchers at the gate had whistles in case they saw anything. Nate’s dad wanted to sleep in the warehouse with Maude Redhill and the others, but Nate wanted to stay with the outsiders. He trusted them. Plus, they had more guns. His father gave him a look but said that God would abide.

  So they settled in the mess hall. The Englishman was appointed as first watch. The adults quickly fell asleep—even the Englishman. Someone might as well have slipped a knockout drop under their tongues.

  But Nate couldn’t sleep. Something awful was happening—had been happening for a while now. Maybe it had been happening since the moment the Reverend stumbled upon this spot in the woods, driven here by the voice of God. What if he’d followed the wrong voice? Sacrilege to think it, his dad would say. Well, maybe his dad was dead wrong, too.

  Had all the adults been wrong? Was building Little Heaven their biggest mistake? Even the strongest adults could be misguided—guys like Mr. Fairweather and Mr. Langtree, who Nate was pretty sure were both dead. Dead: before tonight he had never felt the coffin nail finality of that word. He had lost two goldfish and a hamster, Mr. Pips. That was his only experience with death. His mother had flushed the fish down the toilet—a burial at sea, she called it. Mr. Pips got buried in a shoe box in the backyard of a house they had been renting outside Portsmouth. Nate felt bad at losing them, but their deaths had been quick—he woke up to find the fish floating in their bowl before his mom scooped them out with a little skimmer; Mr. Pips died over the weekend when he was away at his dad’s place, so Nate only saw him inside the box, which his mom had padded with cotton batting. They hadn’t screamed like the men had earlier tonight. He had never heard the fear or the wretched bewilderment that their screams had held, either—fish and hamsters just went glub-glub or squeak-squeak, and then, Nate guessed, they died. So it was different. Humans died in worse ways, or at least Mr. Fairweather and Mr. Langtree and Mr. Redhill had.

  Nate wondered, if those men could walk it all back—the decision to join Reverend Flesher’s congregation and come here to Little Heaven—would they do it? But it was too late. You can’t relive your life. You couldn’t hop into H. G. Wells’s time machine and zap back to the site of your bad decisions and make a better one. If the decisions you made were stupid ones, well, it wasn’t just you who suffered. No fact seemed clearer to Nate than this: adults were as often wrong as right. And what choice did their kids have but to follow along? Wasn’t that your job as a kid—to tag along and not make noise? And a kid has to believe that those added years should equal added wisdom, right? H-E-double-hockey-sticks no! Adults could be stupid when it came down to it. When the rubber hit the road, as his mom would say—his mother, who had been stupid herself, getting locked up in jail when Nate needed her most. He hated being mad at her, and angry at his father for his weakness . . . but his parents’ mistakes had led him here.

  It dawned for the first time how difficult and perhaps how fearful it was to be an adult. And Nate was suddenly and selfishly afraid not only for himself now but also for what it seemed he might become.

  Nate got up. The one-eyed man snored and rolled over—he actually had two eyes now, even though one of them was glass. His shirt was torn, his wounds clumsily covered with duct tape. The black man was slumped in his chair. Nate thought about shaking him for abandoning his responsibility, but he seemed the sort of person who might punch a boy in the face for waking him up. Nate walked to a window. The compound lay motionless under the security lamps. His eyes flicked left, then flicked ri—

  The air soured in his lungs. He tried to back away from the window, but his legs locked up.

  His old playmates. They were back. The four of them linked together, hand to hand. Their skin so pale it was nearly translucent. Could nobody else see them?

  Eli Rathbone was at the end of the chain this time. Eli couldn’t stand; the others dragged him carelessly, the way a toddler might haul a teddy bear by its arm. His body bumped over the ground. He was so thin: a collection of driftwood lashed into the shape of a boy. Nate could see his hip bones—he never knew how bones might look, really, because they were always covered in enough skin. The only skeletons he’d seen were the cardboard ones hung in the windows at Halloween. But Eli looked too much like those skeletons now.

  They approached him quickly; in a heartbeat, they were at the window. Nate tried to call out, but his lips were frozen. A wire ran through his entire body from the tip of his head to his pinkie toe—and that wire tightened, paralyzing him.

  Go away was all he could think. Oh please, just go.

  Elsa was naked. They all were, but Elsa was different. Nate had never seen a naked girl. Boys, sure. A lot of boys were eager to show their penises to whoever. But girls’ bodies were a riddle Nate hadn’t yet solved. Elsa was wasted but with a big tummy like those starving children in Life magazine. Her tiny breasts were deflated like balloons found behind the sofa three months after the party was over, all wrinkly and saggy. Her . . . her vagina (as Missus Edwards used to say in sex-ed class) was a stiff trench between her legs, covered in delicate hairs that had gone gray to match the hair on her head. All the kids’ hair had gone gray—no, white, the shocked white of a fright wig. That, along with their bony bodies and pruney skin, made them look ancient—these young-old things dancing to the jangly notes of a flute.

  They paraded past the window one by one, grinning at him. The skin of their faces was lined and crepey around their jaws but pulled tight around their sockets so that their eyes bulged out. Their teeth were gray as tombstones. Their pupils were a shade of black that didn’t exist in nature, and blown out to cover their whole eyeballs.

  Eli was last. And worst. Nate could see his skull. His skin had worn through at his temples, wearing down the way your toe wears through a cheap Kresge’s sock until there’s only a few fiber fluffs left. His lips were gone: they hadn’t fallen off or been bitten away but had thinned out to the point where they weren’t really there anymore. His gums peeled back from his teeth, which were waaay too big; they looked like the molars the dentist had pulled out of his friend Gregory Betts’s mouth—the dentist gave them to Gregory in a little glass jar and Nate was amazed how long they were with the buried roots visible, like fangs.

  Eli pressed his face to the window. The other kids helped prop him up, like a lifeless puppet. The plastic stretched to flatten his features. His face projected inward, threatening to rip through. His mouth stretched into a grin. His eyes were dark and huge; they reached through the plastic somehow, horrid, swallowing, hunting for something soft inside Nate’s chest.

  Come out, said a voice in Nate’s head. Come out and play.

  Oh no. Nope. No way. That was the last thing on earth he wanted.

  And yet . . .

  His arm jerked. He had no control of it. He tried to scream, but all that came out was a wheeze. He reached toward Eli’s face; Eli’s grin stretched even wider, so big that Nate was sure Eli would eat his fingers through the plastic, grind up his skin and chomp his knuckles and keep on moving down his arm . . . and Nate was even more terrified he would want to keep feeding Eli, helplessly shoving his hand and then his wrist into Eli’s mouth.

  He flung his gaze away from the window. His father was sitting up on the floor, watching Nate. His face was bathed in sweat. His eyes huge wet discs.

  Daddy, Nate mouthed. Oh, Daddy, please . . .

  His father nodded curtly, as if he had just received some bad news. Then he pulled the blankets up, his eyes still bugged out and his hands trembling, lay down, and rolled over into a little ball.

  Nate’s fingers made contact with the plastic window. His head whipped back to see he was touching Eli’s face through the plastic; Eli’s skin was cold and hard, as if Nate had touched stone. He moaned and shut his eyes.

  Oh please, please just don’t make it hurt too much and don’t make me into one of them—

  Then the pressure we
nt away. When Nate looked, Eli was gone. Nobody was at the window.

  He sagged to the floor, shivering uncontrollably. The tips of his fingers were still cold—would they ever feel warm again? He glanced at his father, still rolled on his side, pretending to sleep. A wave of hatred rolled through Nate, so black it made him woozy.

  Coward, he thought. Chicken-guts FAKER.

  Rattling from the mess. Back in the kitchen.

  No, Nate thought. No-no-no-no—the cellar.

  He raced through the swinging galley door. A security lamp shone through the lone window. The kitchen countertops gleamed; the stink of rancid grease hung heavy. A trapdoor was set into the floor at the far end of the kitchen, next to the fridge. The door led down to the cold cellar, which could also be accessed through a set of doors outside. Nate had watched the cook swing those doors open and hump sacks of flour, rice, and potatoes into the storage area; he would bring them up through the trapdoor as needed. The outer doors weren’t locked—only three places in Little Heaven always had locks: the chapel, the Reverend’s quarters, and the windowless bunkhouse.

  The trapdoor rattled again. Nate jumped; his skin felt too tight all of a sudden, as if it were about to split down a hidden seam. The trapdoor was held down under two chains lashed to the ringbolt. When it rattled, the chains rattled, too. Nobody heard it except Nate.

  The trapdoor opened—just a hair. In that heart-stopping slit of darkness, Nate saw their faces. All four of them clustered under the door, peering out at him.

  “You’re cute,” said the Elsa-thing, and giggled.

  It was no longer the voice of a child. It was a choked and sewage-y gurgle, the sound that bubbles up from a clogged drainpipe.

  “Come with us,” said Eli. “Come and be meat.”

  “It will be neat,” said one of the Redhill boys, laughing at the silly rhyme.

  Nate could smell them: ripe and fruity, the stink that wafts through the car vents when you drove past days-old road kill. He said, “No.”

  Eli grinned. His mouth stretched so wide, almost ear to ear—the smile of a shark. Flies buzzed through the trapdoor, fat sluggish ones that landed on the kitchen window and blotted out the moon.

  “It wants you,” Eli said. “It wants you all.”

  Eli began to laugh. The others joined him. Cold nausea swept over Nate. He hated them. Not Eli and Elsa and the Redhills—though they had never been very friendly to him—but whatever they had become. They were disgusting and lewd, and it made his soul sick to look at them.

  Before he knew what he was doing, Nate rushed at them. Stop! STOP! his mind chattered. But he was as mad as he’d ever been. They were bullies before and they still were. You had to stand up to bullies or you would spend your whole life in fear. You would grow up to be a man like his father.

  Nate leapt and came down on top of the trapdoor. It banged down hard. He stood there a moment, seesawing his arms, fear rising in him like a fever. What was he doing? Was he crazy?

  “Go away!” he shouted. “Leave me alone!”

  He felt like raising his arms in victory, washed in a giddy sense of triumph—until the door popped up with a sharp bang, rattling the chains and spilling Nate onto his ass. He yelped and dug in his heels, trying to crab-walk away from the—

  A withered arm shot through the trapdoor gap and snatched his ankle.

  EAT KILL SWALLOW EAT EAT HURT KILL EAT CHEW KILL EAT

  —schniiik!—

  Nate reared back, screaming and clawing at his skull. Something had leapt into his head the moment those fingers closed around his ankle. His mind had been covered in choking oil that blotted everything out—everything except a powerful, uncontrollable urge to break and hurt other living things.

  He was in the kitchen again. The trapdoor was shut. The skinny outsider woman was next to him. She held a huge butcher’s cleaver. Her lips moved, but Nate couldn’t hear her. His head was fuzzy. It had felt as if . . . as if a giant worm or leech had fixed its mouth around his brain, inhaling it into its black guts and transmitting its alien thoughts into him. They were the crudest, the most awful feelings imaginable: of eating and chewing and ripping and just hurting, hurting scared helpless creatures before eating them.

  The skinny woman stabbed down with the knife, impaling something on the tip. A child’s hand. Black blood oozed from its severed wrist. She flung the knife and hand away. It skittered across the floor and jammed up under the fridge.

  “You okay?” she asked. He could hear her now.

  There were five icy blots on Nate’s bare ankle where those fingers had touched him. Nate managed to nod. Whatever had invaded his head was gone now, but coldness continued to seep over his scalp ten times worse than an ice cream headache.

  The one-eyed man came into the kitchen, followed by Ellen and the Englishman.

  “What happened?”

  “One of them was grabbing his leg,” the skinny woman answered the one-eyed man. She stabbed a finger at the Englishman. “What the hell happened to you?”

  The Englishman wiped sleep drool off his chin. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how I—”

  “You fucking moron,” the woman said.

  “One of who?” said Ellen. “Who, Minny?”

  “The children,” the skinny woman said in disbelief. “The boy Eli. Jesus, I’ve never seen anything so awful.”

  The one-eyed man approached the trapdoor. Nate said, “No, please don’t open it.”

  The man pushed him out of the way and lifted the door a few inches. The skinny woman pulled Nate to her chest. The man took another knife off a magnetized rack above the sink, unhooked the chains, and went into the cellar. Nate waited for him to start screaming. Thirty seconds later, he came back.

  “Empty. But the outer doors are open.”

  “What happened, Nate?” Ellen asked.

  The experience seemed too huge and horrible to talk about. The children’s dead eyes, the force taking over his mind . . .

  The one-eyed man crouched beside the severed hand. He touched one finger with the tip of the knife. The other fingers jerked. Nate began to cry when he saw that. Sobs ripped out of his chest, these loon-like whoops.

  We’re all dead, Nate thought. Or worse. Death might be better.

  He glanced over the skinny woman’s shoulder and saw his father hovering at the kitchen door. He waved at Nate. Apologetically, or just confusedly, Nate would never know.

  “Did you see anything, Reggie?” Ellen asked.

  Reggie paused, then shook his head. “I was asleep like all of you. Didn’t see a thing.” He swallowed and said, “We need the Reverend’s guidance. He will tell us—”

  “We don’t need shit from him,” the skinny woman spat.

  Nate glared at his father.

  I hate you.

  The fury of Nate’s thought zipped through the air and slammed into his father. Nate saw his dad flinch from the psychic pain of it. He went back through the swinging door, leaving Nate in the kitchen.

  2

  THE REVEREND AWOKE in the chapel covered in blood.

  He had been biting his hands while he slept. He’d worried divots of flesh out of his palms and wrists and woke up sucking on his own blood.

  Amos was sleeping in the chapel sacristy, in the credenza. He felt safe in there, curled into a ball with the doors shut. He let his hatred collect into a hard little ball, too, nursing it on his own black bile.

  His flock had abandoned him. All but a few—the stupidest and most useless ones. After all he had done for them! The bastards! Cunts! He imagined stealing into the mess hall and finding the largest knife to slit all of their Iscariot throats. Or, if not all of them, then those who had instigated the insurrection. He pictured grabbing Otis Langtree’s hair, drawing the skin of his neck taut, and sawing through his treacherous windpipe. Reaching into Nell Conkwright’s mouth, gripping her eelish tongue, slicing it out at the root, and laughing as the blood splashed his chest. Pinning Charlie Fairweather down and carefully slitting
his eyeballs, pushing on them until the gooey centers burst through the slit like peeled grapes—

  Yes! Nothing would be finer. But of course, he could not. He was physically weak, always had been. His gift was to make people do his bidding through guile and honeyed words and his command of the Good Book . . . or it had been until now. He was powerless, a declawed kitten. His most trusted lieutenants had instigated a rebellion against him. It made him boil with rage. And now, if his understanding of the situation was correct, it was too late to kill them himself. Langtree and Fairweather were dead. He’d watched the scene out of his window—the one-eyed bastard returning alone, then his assault at the hands of Maude Redhill. Good. It was perfectly fine that those traitorous scum were dead. His only sadness was that he couldn’t have watched the life drain out of them personally.

  He heard something out in the chapel.

  Amos crawled out of the credenza. His blood sang and his skin prickled all over. He walked out of the sacristy into the chapel proper. The Voice beckoned him.

  He walked between the pews. Musical notes came from all around him, but from inside of him, too. Something was there in the chapel with him. But the doors and windows were locked. It was Christ’s sanctuary. Yet it was here. A presence. Something with a massive weight and gravity that sucked at the deepest part of him. His soul, just maybe.

  “Hello?” he said childishly.

  Up here.

  His gaze ascended. Something lurked in the apse, in the shadows above the crucified Christ. It seethed in that arched vault, a dark mass that shifted and breathed and chittered.

  “My God . . .”

  Amos Flesher’s heart fluttered. His insides went to water.

  Oh no, the thing spoke in his mind. Not God, child.