Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

Of course not. It never had been. That understanding arrived with a thunderclap. What he was hearing now was the same Voice he had followed to this spot all those months ago. Not the voice of God, but a different one—a Voice of chaos and blood. A Voice that hummed like flies sometimes; other times it sounded like a worm of limitless length coiling around and around its own infinite body. And . . . Amos was fine with that. Yes, he was. The fact rested easily in his head. A gear locked in place, spinning contentedly on its axis.

  The thing in the rafters of the ruined, befouled chapel gibbered and giggled. Amos saw only a hint of its true shape. It was enough. It spoke to him in a familiar voice.

  “You have been fiddling with your dirty stick, haven’t you?”

  Amos was unsurprised to find he had an erection. It tented the satiny material of his pajamas. Idly, he reached under the waistband and began to pull on his cock. It felt nice to milk it like an itsy-bitsy udder.

  “Yes,” he said stupidly.

  “Fiddling and fiddling and fiddling . . . ,” the thing crooned.

  Amos pulled with greater force. He was going to make a mess. Back at the orphanage, he hated doing that; he would tease himself to the point of release, then grip it and squeeze so his seed wouldn’t spill out, so hard that blood vessels burst on the head of his penis. But he wasn’t worried about that now. He pulled on it real hard, just like the soft-brain Finn used to do to his own thick mongoloid dick. Amos yanked so forcefully that the skin ripped down the shaft, though it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, it felt wonderful. The air touched the ripped flesh with a pleasant tingle. He wasn’t thinking of anything remotely sexual; instead, he envisioned that his body had turned into an enormous mouth with teeth the size of bricks, snapping and chattering around inside the locked orphanage, chasing screaming kids and grinding them up, breaking their bones and pulping their soft flesh and cracking their skulls between his mammoth molars like walnuts and—

  “What do you want?” he asked, feverishly.

  “You know what,” Sister Muriel said.

  And Amos did know. The Voice wanted what it had always wanted. What it had brought Amos out here for. The sweetest fruit of Little Heaven.

  Amos began to laugh. It started out as effervescent titters but soon became throaty, then booming. It was not entirely sane, that laughter, but then, Little Heaven was no longer a sane place.

  Amos wanted to obey the Voice. More than he’d ever wanted to follow the tenets of God. The Creator was a stodgy old bore. God stifled the true nature of man. The Voice spoke directly to that nature and asked that Amos do nothing more than give vent to the brutality that had long lurked at his core.

  “Give it to me,” Sister Muriel—or the thing that was speaking in her voice—called down to him. “Give me what I want and I’ll give you what you need . . .”

  But as Amos was a physical weakling and at heart a coward, he would have to be crafty. Well, crafty he could be. A plan was already flying together in his head, the pieces slotting flush.

  “Yes.” His voice floated up into the poisoned chapel as Christ stared down impassively from His cross. “Yes.”

  3

  EBENEZER WAS UP AT DAWN, heading out of the mess hall and across the square. Micah called after him, but Eb didn’t bother to acknowledge his hail.

  Eb stopped at a shed and grabbed a red toolbox. The box rattled against his thigh as he strode across the compound to the front gates. The sun was rising over the trees to lighten the woods. A few hollow-eyed Heavenites stood watch.

  “Good morning, chappies,” he said to them. “Open up, daylight’s wasting.”

  He was tired of these cornpone, Bible-bashing troglodyte shitbirds. They could go eat a bucket of elephant testicles, for all he cared. A big ole pailful, as these buffoons might say. Hyuk, hyuk. Crass, yes, but he had reached the end of his tether. If he was going to die, so be it. But not among these ingrate yokels, who would drag his soul into some hillbilly purgatory, where he’d be forced to listen to washboard-and-jug band jamborees for all eternity. Hell would be preferable.

  When the morons didn’t move, Eb lifted the latch himself and pushed the gate open. He was whistling a Cockney tune. His hair had gone frizzy and was tangled up with shreds of dead leaves and maple keys—he would kill, quite literally kill, for a hot shower and a bottle of Lustre-Creme shampoo. Sunlight washed the access road, touching the body of Charlie Fairweather, who lay three hundred yards off. Well, half of Charlie, by the looks of it. Poor bastard.

  Two motorbikes were parked past the gates. One was an old French Metisse with a 350cc two-stroke engine. The other was a newer Japanese model.

  Micah caught up with him. His posture wasn’t threatening, only curious.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Leaving, good chum,” Eb said. “Hitting the lonesome trail, in your Yank parlance.”

  He snapped open the toolbox, which he had stocked the day before for this very eventuality. He retrieved a can of two-in-one oil. He lubricated the chain and the suspension rig on the Metisse, straddled the seat, and bounced up and down to work the oil into the shock absorbers. Minerva hung back at the gates, watching him.

  Micah said, “Think you will make it?”

  “A bike is more nimble than that truck. It’s perfect for this terrain.”

  “You think you’re gonna leave us with our asses hanging out, huh?” Minerva called over.

  Ebenezer spoke to her over Micah’s shoulder. “I’m taking a sabbatical, milady. Much to your dismay, I can only guess. I promise to send a postcard.”

  Minerva pulled Ellen’s pistol from her waistband, cocked it, and held it to her thigh. Ebenezer could only smile.

  “Will you shoot me in the back?”

  Minerva cocked her head as if to say, Try me. Ebenezer’s smile widened.

  “Your aim is suspect, my dear. I’ll take my chances.”

  He bent over the bike to check the timing gear. Someone shouted. “Hey! What the hell you think you’re doing?”

  Ebenezer turned. Hooray, if it wasn’t Virgil, the more dunderheaded shitkicker of the Reverend’s gruesome twosome.

  “Hey—black boy! That ain’t your property! You ain’t gonna—”

  Virgil’s voice drilled into Ebenezer’s ears, unlocking an old memory. As a child, he and a friend had queued up for a showing of Crossfire starring Robert Mitchum at the Grenada Theatre. They had saved up all week. But when they reached the wicket, the ticket seller told them No Negroes allowed. He said it casually, almost apologetically—an existential apology for their bad luck to have been born black, a stain that would doom them the rest of their lives. So Ebenezer and his friend snuck in through the fire door and sat in the empty balcony section. But before the newsreel even finished, an usher found them. He clouted Eb on the ear with one fat fist. Sneaky little tar babies! he’d hissed, and chased them down the stairs. They ran out the emergency door closest to the movie screen. The sunlight hit Eb’s eyes, dazzling in its intensity; he turned to see the white people in the front row rearing back at the sudden light, their faces pale and marbly as cheese—they looked like terrified vampires at the moment Van Helsing let the sunlight into their coffins. Eb and his friend dashed down the alley to the street. The usher pursued for a block or two, but he was a porker and he faded fast, heaving on the cobbles, shaking an impotent fist.

  Afterward, Eb sat on the curb outside the sweetshop, nursing his swollen ear. He had a powerful urge to go back and hurt that usher. In his young mind, he pictured a very sharp, long knife. He saw himself pinning the usher’s hand down by the wrist and cutting deep between the webbing of his fingers, halfway down his palm, so that when the flesh healed the man would be left with these tangly, freakish witch-fingers, long and spidery with almost no palm to speak of. But Ebenezer hadn’t owned a knife and lacked the will to steal one.

  Ebenezer now thought of that afternoon because Virgil looked an awful lot like that usher. He wasn’t nearly as fat, but he was stalking toward Eb with the sam
e goatish belligerence, his eyes squinted in vaporous idiocy. Ebenezer reached into the toolbox and selected a heavy wrench.

  “What the fuck you think you’re doing, you uppity nig—”

  Ebenezer threw it. The wrench spun end over end, tomahawk-style, and poleaxed Virgil spang between the eyes. Virgil went down on one knee, looking like Al Jolson singing the crescendo of “My Mammy,” then staggered up and tilted off in a new direction toward the trees. His forehead was split open, blood pissing out.

  Eb curled his hand around an old spark plug lying in the toolbox and walked over to Virgil. He swung his fist in a tight arc, clouting Virgil on the back of his head. Virgil grunted and fell face-first into the dirt. Ebenezer turned him over and punched him in the face, hard. And again. And again. Virgil’s eyelids fluttered, and blood leaked from both sides of his mouth.

  “Eb,” Micah said.

  Ebenezer turned. He could feel the warmth of Virgil’s blood freckling his face.

  Micah said, “Lay off.”

  “Cheerfully!” Eb said. He rolled Virgil over, grabbed the man’s gun from his waistband, then walked back to the bike and tossed the spark plug into the toolbox. Virgil lay still with blood bubbling out of his mouth.

  “Those things in the woods, Eb,” said Micah, taking no interest in the downed man. “They are fast.”

  “I saw them before, Micah. Back at the campsite.”

  “No. These ones are different.”

  Eb sighed. “What choice do we have? No phone, no telegram, no carrier pigeons, no smoke signals. Someone has to get out of here. Who does it hurt if that someone is me?”

  Micah said, “You coming back?”

  “No,” Eb said evenly. “Why the hell would I? But I promise I’ll call the authorities. I’ll have Johnny Law dispatched here posthaste.”

  “If you make it.”

  “If I make it.”

  Micah considered this. “Give us some time. We can help.”

  Micah went away with Minerva. Ebenezer spent the good part of an hour tinkering with the bike. Doc Lewis and another man showed up meanwhile and dragged Virgil off; Virgil’s boot heels left shallow rails in the dirt.

  The sun skinned above the trees. Shapes shifted in the bad light of the woods. The electric tang of dread lay heavy in Eb’s mouth. Micah returned with Ellen and two male followers. Both men carried compound bows.

  “Ellen made these.”

  Micah held up a globe of paper-thin glass with a hole in the top. The men filled each globe with gasoline—now a precious resource—and lashed the globes to hunting arrows with duct tape.

  “We will try to hit a few,” Micah said. “At least you will see them coming.”

  Ebenezer duct-taped Virgil’s gun to the motorbike’s handlebars. He kick-started the engine. The motor coughed, sputtered, then buzzed to life.

  “You better make that fuckin’ phone call!” Minerva shouted over the engine.

  “I’ll miss you most of all!” he shouted back to her.

  The men notched arrows in their bows. Ellen lit the gasoline in the glass bowls. Micah hefted the Tarpley rifle. Minerva had Ellen’s .38 pistol.

  “We’ll lay down cover,” she said grudgingly. “Race like your ass is on fire.”

  Minerva and Micah jogged fifty yards ahead. The shapes in the trees were massing now. Ebenezer gunned the engine; the bike buzzed louder—those wine-swilling Frenchies made one hell of a motorcycle.

  Ah, well, Eb thought. Who wants to live forever?

  Two arrows arced over his head. One hit a tree, whose trunk went up in a furious cone of fire. The other arrow hit one of the creatures, which shrieked as flames burst over its body. The fire clawed all over it to showcase its enormous and baffling size.

  “Go!” Micah shouted.

  Eb opened the throttle. The bike took off like a scalded cat. He raced between Minerva and Micah, bike screaming, tachometer in the red. The bike bottomed out in a rut, the chassis kicking up sparks. He shot past Charlie Fairweather’s corpse—Charlie’s eyes wide open, his dust-covered intestines resembling floured sausage links. Two more arrows arced overhead; something went up fifty yards ahead of him, a lunatic combustion that threw the woods into momentary relief. Noises from all angles, a cacophony of screeches and howls.

  Something charged from his left-hand side; he cranked the bars to the right. Micah’s rifle cracked; the thing skip-tumbled away, a good chunk of its anatomy obliterated by the blast—

  The tires hit a rut; the bike wobbled, threatening to spill him off, but he recovered and rose up off the seat as the bike launched out of the rut on a bad line. The wheels spun, engine whining, before he slammed back down. His skull hammered the handlebars. He pulled his head up, woozy, seeing stars—he was riding straight at the trees. An abomination loomed out of the woods: the skulls of many animals smashed together, the bone humped and carbuncled like a walnut with a horrible mouth splitting its surface. Ebenezer dropped one leg down and wrenched the bars hard, spinning a tight one-eighty; he gunned the throttle, and the bike reared up as something snagged at his shirt collar, slitting the material and leaving a burning line of pain down his back. He cat-walked the bike away from the trees, shifted his weight to bring the front tire down again, and slewed onto the path. Blood was trickling down his back. He shot past the pickup truck and caught a flash of blood on its windows and a headless body slumped against the tire.

  Sweat dripped into his eye; he blinked, and when his vision cleared, he saw something in the firs to his right, forty yards ahead. It kept rising and rising in a crazed mass of limbs like a living totem pole. It slumped forward, falling like a tree but much faster—more like an enormous whip being cracked. It slapped down on the path, sending up a stinking puff of dust, this terrible skinned rope studded with red-rimmed eyes and mouths full of teeth gnashing with mindless hunger—

  Eb jerked the handlebars, popping the front wheel up, and hurdled the thing like a speed bump. The tires burred over its body, sending up the stink of burned rubber; for a heart-sinking moment Eb was sure the thing’s teeth or claws would puncture the tire, leaving him to flee on the shredded rim, but the rubber held, thank Christ.

  The path widened and ran flat; the shapes between the trees began to thin. He sensed movement from behind, things blundering and crashing through the bush, but he was moving faster than them now.

  Ha-haaaaah! he thought joyously. Run, run, just as fast as you can, you can’t catch me—I’m the bloody GINGERBREAD MAN!

  A shadow fell across his shoulder. He caught the decayed smell of his pursuer. He glanced back in time to see something swooping in from above. Its plated wings were fanned out, a fearsome ten-foot span of vein-threaded blackness. He swerved to avoid its predatory strike; its wings flapped directly overhead, the air filling with rancid white dust like the powder off a moth. It latched onto his ear; its talons were blunt but incredibly powerful—it was like getting pierced with ballpoint pens. The creature flapped its enormous wings; Eb’s ass lifted a few inches off the seat. He screamed as the thing tried to muscle itself skyward; it raked his head with other claws, these much sharper, slicing his scalp open.

  Eb clung desperately to the handlebars as the thing rose up, clutching his ear like an angry schoolmarm. One hand was pried off the bars, his fingers barely holding on; his screams intensified as his panic hit maximum intensity. Then, with a fibrous zippering tear, part of his ear was gone, ripped right off the side of his head. He barely felt it, on account of the adrenaline washing through his system. He dropped back onto the seat; the shocks groaned as the bike bottomed out again, spraying a fan of gravel. There came a pressurized hiss as blood sprayed from the wound, flowing around his jaw and down his neck.

  The thing screeched and wheeled through the air in front of him. This huge black thing, part bat and part buzzard and part snake but larger than those creatures by far, with a segmented tail that winnowed to the stinger of a scorpion.

  Eb ripped the pistol off the handlebars and fired. T
he second bullet hit its chest; the thing was blown backward in midair, body crumpling as it crashed into the roadside nettles.

  Ebenezer tossed the gun away. This was his chance, maybe his only one. He could hear them behind him, a murderous stampede. He opened the throttle. The bike whined in protest; fingers of black smoke trailed up from the transmission.

  Come on, Eb thought desperately. Just a few more miles, little pony.

  The path dropped steadily downward. He maneuvered the bike over small dirt moguls and shale slides, laying off the throttle and letting the momentum take hold. Casting a glance back, he saw nothing.

  The engine was so hot that it baked the flesh of his calf, but the little Metisse didn’t overheat or conk out. If he made it through this, Ebenezer would never speak ill of the French again. The side of his head throbbed where part of his ear had been wrenched off; he touched the wound and recoiled as blistering pain shot through his skull. Christ Almighty. Well, at least he already wore his hair long. Blood leaked down his forehead from the shallow cuts in his scalp, but he didn’t feel faint yet.

  He rode until he hit the creek. Its bottom was covered in water-polished stones as one might find in an ornamental aquarium. He gussied the bike down the banks and into the shallows. Water hissed off the engine. He gingerly nosed it forward. The rear tire stuttered over the smooth stones; the bike slid out from under him, but he was able to hold it up and goose the throttle until the tires caught again. The motor almost cut out at the deepest point, water rising up to the base of the gearbox, but Eb powered it through with a few quick punches on the throttle.

  He geared up the far bank and let the bike idle. He wanted to switch it off and let it cool down, but he wasn’t sure it would start again. He was not being pursued, that he could see. He swung the bike around and continued down the road.

  At some point, the path bled into a clearing. The grass ran waist-high on either side. In the afternoon sunlight, he could see Ellen’s car parked at the cut.

  “Holy shit.” He slapped the side of the bike the way a cowboy might the flanks of a trusty steed. “We made it.”