by Nick Cutter
He lifted his head. There it was. The shoofly pie. Dark, with a flaky crust. He picked up the fork and meticulously cleaned the tines with a paper napkin from the dispenser. Then he flicked the fork away sharply—it pinged off the steel coffee cistern—picked up the pie with his bare, blood-stained hands, and shoveled it into his mouth. Eb ate the thick wedge in five wolfish bites, barely chewing, just stuffing it in until his cheeks bulged, then swallowing with a sinuous motion like a snake devouring a gerbil.
“Christ on a dirt bike, Flo, that’s some good pie!” he roared with such force that bits of filling sprayed from his mouth. “Shoofly, you don’t bother me!”
He pushed himself up and rocked back on his heels. He took a big swig of coffee, burning the top of his mouth in the process, shouted, “Ye gods, Myrtle, that’s some hot joe!” then pulled the dollar bill from his pocket, smoothed it out over the counter’s edge, and set it down primly on his empty plate.
“I shall tell my friends of this place, Darla!” he informed the startled waitress. “I’ll sing its praises to the high heavens! Come for the pie, I’ll tell them, but stay for the delightful fucking hospitality!”
The woman in the booth covered her daughter’s ears. Her husband—a square-jawed clodhopper in dungarees—appeared as if he might make something of it, but he took a good look at Ebenezer and must have figured his daughter would hear worse in her life.
“Good day to you,” Eb said, booting the door open, “and God bless!”
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Ebenezer pulled into Jimmy’s Gun Rack. It was closed. Either Jimmy had knocked off early or folks around here didn’t purchase elephant guns past four o’clock. Either way, Eb’s task would be much easier with the shop empty.
He knocked on the front door. No answer. He knocked harder, in case Jimmy was asleep in the storeroom. When that got no response, he walked around back. No car. He returned out front and drove the Olds around back. The mesa stretched away behind the shop—nothing but miles of sand studded with scraggly cacti.
The delivery door was locked, but not with a dead bolt. Instead, steel collars were attached to the door and the cinderblock wall, clasped with a heavy padlock.
Eb popped the trunk and peeled back the floor upholstery. The scissor jack sat atop the emergency spare. He grabbed the jack handle—a two-foot steel rod—and approached the door. He threaded the handle through the shackle U and levered his body against it.
“Come on, you old slapper,” he grunted, putting his full weight on the jack handle.
The lock popped. The jack handle swung up and cracked Eb in the forehead. He staggered back, dazed, and fell on his ass in the dirt.
The lock fell to the earth. The door swung open and—
BOOM!
The heavy steel door blew open like a screen door caught in the wind, slammed the shop’s brick wall, the knob chipping the cement, and ricocheted back.
Eb staggered up and peeked around the door frame. The inside of the door was shredded with pock-holes. A Mossberg shotgun was parked five feet within the entryway, strapped to a mount of welded steel. Copper wire was wrapped around the trigger, the trailing end looped through a series of metal eyelets along the ceiling to a hook on the door.
“Jumpin’ Jesus Christ, Jimmy,” Eb whispered, shaken. “Some might call that excessive.”
He eased past the homemade booby trap and into the storeroom. He flicked a light and gazed over the halogen-lit interior. There didn’t appear to be any other nasty surprises—not obvious ones, anyway.
He grabbed a Beretta 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun and ten boxes of shells. To this he added a pair of Colt M1911s, a hundred rounds of ammo, and six spare clips. He stashed everything in the car trunk, then went back inside. He shed his shirt and pants. His chest and arms were cut, but apart from his ear the damage was superficial. He donned a camouflage hunting outfit he found in the main showroom.
Then he went back for the flamethrower he’d pointed out to Micah when they had first come into the shop. He hefted the canisters. Something sloshed inside the left one—jellied gasoline. The right one would be full of nitrogen propellant.
He found a few other items—a bowie knife, a flare gun, some stout rope, and a Zippo lighter in a desk in Jimmy’s office. The lighter sat next to some cigars. Once he identified them as genuine Cubanos and not the trick exploding kind, he slid two of them into the chest pocket of his spiffy new hunting outfit.
He muscled the flamethrower into the Oldsmobile’s backseat. He considered leaving a note for Jimmy, telling him his store had been looted by the forces of good . . . but he did not do this, because he was not an especially good person and felt no compulsion to lie about it. He did close the back door. The least he could do.
Ebenezer followed the highway until he found a deserted access road. He drove a mile down it and stopped. He opened the trunk, loaded the guns and the spare clips. A scorpion sunned itself on a flat rock nearby.
He got into the car and drove back to the head of the access road. A big store sat on the side of an otherwise deserted stretch a few hundred yards off. Big Al’s Bargain Village. He swung into its parking lot. The dusty bay window showcased the store’s wares. Blenders and fondue pots and tennis rackets and sterling silver tea sets—Al’s got everything under the sun! the display boasted.
A seventeen-inch Magnavox TV was broadcasting an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. Bug-eyed Barney Fife was giving Opie advice. Someone was always giving Opie advice. The carrot-topped, weedy idiot. Eb closed his eyes and rested his head against the glass. Are you really going to do this? he asked himself. Are you that much of a damned fool? He pictured those monstrosities skulking through the woods; he recalled the charnel stink wafting off the one that had swooped down and aggressively relieved him of half his ear.
He didn’t owe any of them a Christly thing. It had been a business arrangement, nothing more. He’d fulfilled his end of the bargain, hadn’t he?
“Can I help you, fella?”
A fat man in a seersucker suit stared at him from the store entrance. Big Al his own self, by the looks of it. He had the flat-hanging, shiny red face of a carnival barker—but he didn’t look all too impressed to see a black man in a camouflage outfit mooning around his display window.
“Just reflecting on life,” Eb said.
“That so, Alec Guinness?” Big Al bit his thumbnail; his teeth crunched on the calcified enamel. “Does that reflection include a desire for midquality consumer goods?”
Ebenezer smiled. “I guess not.”
“Then I’ll kindly ask you to fuck right off.”
Ebenezer laughed. “And the horse I rode in on, yes?”
“That’s about the size of it. I don’t need your nose prints all over my glass.”
Still chuckling, Eb walked back to the car. Big Al glared after him. Eb slid behind the wheel and fired up the Olds. “Eve of Destruction” was playing on the radio. He cranked the volume knob and peeled out of the lot, heading back in the direction he’d come.
7
DARKNESS HAD NEARLY FALLEN by the time Minerva and Micah reached the rock. They stopped twenty yards from its southern face. It was black as obsidian. Its outcroppings were sharp as cut glass, impervious to the scourings of wind and rain. Its sheer face climbed nearly two hundred yards before reaching a flat apex. Micah wondered if there was a route to the summit—and, if one existed, did they really want to see what was up there?
They circumnavigated the rock, working eastward. They kept their distance from it, walking through the clingy sand that carpeted the slope. The sun’s dying rays washed the woods, but did not lighten the monolith itself. It was as if the sun’s light was consumed by it.
It took half an hour to cut around to its eastern face. The monolith was carved sharply, its angles nearly as neat as those on a skyscraper. The new face rose even more sheerly: a black mirror that, instead of reflecting, swallowed the reflections of anything set before it.
The sun set behind the firs. T
he woods were quiet. The only sound came from the rock itself: a low bristling hum, as if, behind its edgeless face, trillions of flies were filling its core with the seethe of their industry.
“This place is terrible,” Minerva said, standing off Micah’s shoulder.
Micah could not disagree. It was dreadful to encounter such spots: places that appeared to have experienced horrors that, while unseen and ages-old, were still trapped there—held there by whatever malignancy had minted them. But there was no visible evidence. No sacrificial altar, no open graves or moldering skulls mounted on pikes. Just the implacable rock and the fearsome chill it gave off.
They came upon an entrance of sorts: an inverted V in the rock face, about twenty feet tall at its apex. Darkness crawled out of it. It gave off a more profound cold, too: Micah’s forearms broke out in gooseflesh. He removed a flashlight from his pack and shone it into the cleft. The beam gave no indication how far in it went or where it might lead.
“Think the kids are in there?” Minerva said. Her voice was tight with strain. “We could keep walking around the whole—”
“This is the place, Minny.”
“Yeah. Feels like it.”
The cleft was five feet wide at its base, but it narrowed quickly; they had to duck to get inside. The cleft gave way to a cavern carved through the rock. The flashlight picked up a scattering of pebbles on its uneven floor. Mineral deposits jagged down from the cavern’s ceiling: they were two feet long, skinny as soda straws. These weird rock icicles. One raked the top of Micah’s scalp like the scrape of an emery board. The rock was wet here, with a popcorny appearance: it resembled a vast exposed brain.
The tunnel was set on a gradual decline, almost too imperceptible to discern. The air was stale with an alkaline undertaste—the taste that comes up off hot pavement after a storm. Micah swept the beam over the walls and ceiling, which was no longer carbuncled but instead perfectly rounded, as if it had been smoothed with a grinder. Their breath filled the cramped space, creating vibrations that flitted against the sensitive apparatus of their inner ears.
A sly squirming noise emanated overhead. Micah stopped. Minerva ran into his back and let out a squawk. He pressed a finger to his lips. The squirming was wet, unctuous, lush. He swung the beam up to the cave ceiling. Minerva dry-heaved in revulsion.
The ceiling was covered in a seething mass. Eelish creatures, each roughly three inches long, carpeted the rock. They were pale yellow, the color of margarine or the fatty tissue of an excised tumor. Their pencil-thin bodies were belled at one end and tipped with a flagellate tail at the other. Thousands of them squirmed on the rock above.
“Olms,” Micah said quietly. “A kind of salamander. They are not native to this part of the world.”
The creatures massed into large balls the size of grapefruits. The balls quivered pendulously, threatening to fall and splat on the floor—or on their upturned faces.
“What the hell are they doing?”
“Breeding,” said Micah.
They moved past the olms, deeper into the cavern. The flashlight swept over something . . . Micah registered it the next instant and swung the beam back. A hair barrette. Dull pink. The sort of thing a girl wore. The little Rasmussen girl, for instance.
The cavern narrowed until they had to walk single file. Minerva grabbed ahold of Micah’s belt loop. The blackness pushed back at them, almost a physical presence; if he shut off the flashlight—or if the batteries suddenly died—Micah imagined it slipping over them, inside of them, sliding around their eyeballs and between their lips, a predatory darkness seeking something to feast upon. He stumbled and set a hand on the wall to steady himself. The rock was not cold to the touch, at least not this deep inside the monolith: it was warm and slick, like the flesh of a sleeping giant.
The floor dropped away five feet ahead; the flashlight beam picked up motes of dust swirling in a mammoth darkness.
“Hold up,” said Micah.
They had reached the lip of a precipice. There was just enough room to perch at its edge. Micah shone the light down. The drop was nearly straight. Micah guessed it was a thirty-foot fall. At the bottom was a basin with a ten-foot-wide base. He could make out the mouth of a tunnel down there; it was more cramped than the cavern they had already traversed—the tunnel looked to be about four feet in height, three feet in diameter. It must lead deeper inside the rock.
A rope ladder traveled down the face of the drop; the rope was sturdy but old, the wooden rungs worn smooth with age. Micah shone the light upward. The ceiling bellied a few feet above them. There was just the precipice, the drop, and the tunnel mouth below.
“Who would put a ladder here?” Minerva said.
Micah grunted. It wasn’t a question worth contemplating. The ladder was here. That was the only thing that mattered. He kicked a pebble over the edge and followed it with the flashlight. It bounced off the rocks at the bottom of the basin and skipped toward the mouth of the tunnel—
Micah’s breath hitched, then whistled out on a near-silent note.
Four sticks. Craggy and white as driftwood. Four sticks were latched around the top of the tunnel’s mouth. At least, that’s what they looked like on first blush. So much so that Micah’s mind tried to immediately dismiss them as such. Except for their placement. How would sticks get to such a place? How would they find themselves latched round a tunnel mouth so deep within this place? Maybe they were exposed roots—but if so, roots to what? What tree or weed could grow down there? And how would those roots push themselves out of solid rock?
Then it dawned on him that those sticks were moving ever so slightly. They were vibrating minutely, in fact, the outermost stick lifting and coming down again on the rock. Tapping, almost . . .
. . . almost like a finger.
Four more sticks materialized close to that first bundle. They crept out of the darkness at the tunnel’s mouth and latched around its upper curvature. Micah stood frozen. The fingers were long and wiry like insulated electrical cables. Well, isn’t that odd? Dreamily, Micah wondered what they could be attached to. He tried to picture the wrists and arms, the body . . . Next, his brain went dark, his synapses dimming like a cityscape during a rolling blackout.
Then came the sounds. They traveled up from the tunnel below them. The laughter of children. A charmless sound, full of mocking malice.
“Come.”
A child’s voice. But not exactly. More the voice of a child who had lived in this sunless place for a minor eternity. A child whose eyes were yellow as a cat’s eyes and whose flesh has the look of old parchment. A wizened and corrupted thing whose throaty chuckling drifted up from the bowels of the earth.
“Meat for the feast,” the voice called.
The strain of terror that entered Micah’s heart at that moment was unlike any he’d ever felt—even worse than anything he’d experienced in Korea, though he had been scared an awful lot over there. But those were understandable fears. Fears about what war—and the machinations of his fellow man—could do to your body and mind. He was ripped back through time to a cold night in Korea when he’d been walking past the medic’s tent; the flap blew open in a high wind. He saw a young soldier—still a boy, really—lying on a makeshift bed. His arms and legs had been blown off. All that was left were these rags of flesh that swung and drooped from the stumps of his legs like thick moldering curtains. The boy wasn’t screaming. The shock put him beyond all that. Micah had glimpsed the surgeon’s eyes above his blood-spattered mask: they reflected a dull emptiness, as if he wasn’t seeing the patient in front of him. A single word drifted out of that open flap before the wind blew it shut again: Mommy. One of those men had called out for his mother—and Micah was almost positive that it hadn’t been the soldier’s voice.
The terror of war was a bodily one—the fear that you might die in the shit and muck or, worse, get blown apart and live and have to continue on in a horribly reduced capacity. But at least it was a known horror, and your enemy was clear.
He shared your same skin.
But right now? Those fingers curled round the rock and the sound of that laughter . . . it was a rip in the everyday fabric. A glimpse in the roiling heart of something impossible to comprehend. Even those things in the woods were dangerous only to a point: they would rip you to shreds and make an end of you. Tear your guts out like they had done to poor Charlie and Otis, who were beyond suffering now.
“Shug?” Minerva said from someplace over the mountain and far away.
Micah’s eyes remained on those fingers. They tensed as if in preparation to propel the rest of its body forward the way a spider pushes itself from its hidey-hole: the legs coming first, spanning all around the hole, then the fat black nut of its body surging forth—
The laughter dried up . . . Then it returned even louder than before.
Minerva gripped his wrist. “Please.”
8
BE PENITENT. Be remorseful. Be the father they need.
Reverend Amos Flesher sat cross-legged on the chapel floor. A chapel built to his exact specifications and erected by his flock. For months, he had sermonized from its pulpit. His people had received his words with the lamblike docility he had entrenched in them and thus come to expect.
But now, their trust in him had been shaken. At first he had been angered by their treachery—his rage had been such that he’d pictured bashing their heads in until their skulls resembled broken, bloodied crockery . . . but then the Voice spoke, and he listened. Now he understood that the best way back into his people’s hearts was through atonement. He had to grovel on his belly.
Be humbled, Amos. Humbled before God and humbled by these ungodly circumstances. They will welcome you back into their hearts.
He stood and walked between the pews. He inhaled the lemony scent of the wood wax—he had insisted upon the brand, as he had insisted on the tiniest detail at Little Heaven. He stood before the chapel window. Night hung over the compound. His face was reflected in the glass. His cheeks were furred with a three-day beard, his eyes set deep in his sockets. No matter. He would feel so much better soon. He had been promised, hadn’t he? All he had to do was fulfill his end of the bargain. And Amos would have help in this, he knew. It was in the water now, in the food they ate and the air they all breathed. They were helpless against the forces marshaling against them. They were mindless insects. But then, in Amos’s eyes, they always had been. They would come back to him, slaves to the sonar in their meek little brains that carried them to Amos like ants back to a poisoned hill.