Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  He fixed his hair, setting it just so. He set his shoulders and straightened his spine, drawing himself up to his full height. A showman must always hold a sense of the moment.

  He walked between the pews to the front doors. His hands gripped the brass knobs—L imprinted on the left, H on the right.

  “Showtime.”

  He threw the doors open. Then he signaled Virgil to ring the bell. It tolled steadily, rolling over the compound and into the inhospitable woods. He spread his arms.

  “Come, my children,” he whispered. “Come back to me.”

  He watched them stumble into the square. Single worshippers at first, but they were soon joined by entire families. They were fearful and bruised of spirit. Amos would salve them. It was his gift. His voice was their balm. His people stood before his chapel like frightened animals. Its beckoning light spilled over Amos’s shoulders. He saw that light reflected in the eyes of his flock.

  “I stand penitent before you. I want to say that I am sorry,” he said. “Truly I am.”

  NATE WAS WITH ELLEN when the chapel bell began to toll. Each ring shivered the bunkhouse walls. Nate went to the window. The Reverend was standing at the chapel door with his arms outspread.

  Ellen opened the bunkhouse door. She and Nate stepped onto the grass. The things in the woods hadn’t been heard from all day. But it was night now, and that was always when monsters came out.

  People began to filter into the square. They look so lost, Nate thought. A lot of them wore timid, hopeful smiles. They walked with their heads tilted forward and their fingers pointing back. They looked cartoonish, like Porky Pig drifting toward a pie cooling on a windowsill: they all had that same dozy, dopey expression.

  His father passed by. “You coming, Nate?”

  Nate gave him a flat stare. “Maybe later.”

  His dad shoved his hands in his pockets. He tried to smile, but his face wouldn’t cooperate. “Things will get better, buddy. You just watch. The Reverend will—”

  Nate grabbed Ellen’s hand. His father saw it. He dropped his head and nodded once, a tiny bob of his head, then followed the others.

  “You don’t want to go with him?” Ellen asked once he was gone.

  Nate shook his head. “I don’t trust him.”

  “The Reverend or your father?”

  Neither of them, Nate thought.

  “COME IN, COME,” Amos said. “Enter the house of the holy.”

  Nell Conkwright—the leprous cunt, the scheming bitch the sea hag the whore—stopped at the chapel threshold. She licked her lips, as if physically hungry for everything that lay within. But she couldn’t quite force herself through. She eyeballed Amos coldly.

  Amos waited. A bubble of tension formed. His heart rate quickened. Nell’s husband stepped forward, brushing past his wife, entering the forgiving warmth of the chapel. Nell reached for him—he shrugged her off with an inelegant, brusque move, as if swiping dandruff flakes off his sleeve. His eyes were focused inside the chapel, on Jesus up on His cross where He suffered eternally for the sins of mankind. Nell Conkwright gaped at Amos, that coldness giving way to a submissive helplessness. Amos smiled at her, mild as milk. Nell Conkwright dropped her head and followed her husband inside.

  Amos knew right then that he had them. All of them, mind and soul. They were his to hold and hone, as they had always been. He tamped down a grin. His smile had begun to look manic lately.

  They came. Some eagerly, some hesitantly, some even angrily, which was not wholly unexpected—but they all came. The spell had been cast. That old black magic. Amos stroked the odd shoulder as his worshippers filed in, laying hands on his people. He had to physically stop himself from squeezing too hard—if he did that, his hands might take on life of their own, tearing at fleshy spittle-wet lips and gouging at eyes filled with gaseous idiocy. Bastards and bitches, traitors and heretics, scum-scum-scum-scum . . . Most of them smiled at him gratefully, the way a whipped dog will still wag its tail when a cruel master pets it.

  When they had all come inside, Amos stepped outside the doors. The woods pinched in from every angle. The generators sputtered; they were down to the last few gallons of gasoline by now. The spots dimmed and flickered.

  Amos stared into the forest. He could not see anything, but he felt it—something watching. Something black and primitive, built of blood and old bones, breathing back at him. Encouraging him, oh yes. That something, whatever it was, wanted him to succeed and would aid his efforts to make that success a reality. His silent benefactor.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly, to no one at all.

  Amos shut the doors and ushered himself to the pulpit. He basked in the warm, approving gaze of his congregants. Whether it was approval of him or simply approval of this ritual—the chapel, the uncomfortable wooden pews under their asses once again, the biblical verses they would move their bloated lips to like cows chewing cud—mattered very little to Amos. Whatever the cause, he soaked up their abject need like a sponge.

  “Brothers and Sisters,” he said, “the devil has come to Little Heaven.”

  They made no noise at this. It was obvious, wasn’t it?

  “I’ve been in deep palaver with our Lord these past hours and days,” he said. “It has taken me to the edge of sanity—sometimes, just for a moment, I felt it slip. Now, I’m going to be just as plain as I know how to tell you. I’ve never lied to you,” he lied. “I never have lied to you. An evil has come down on our heads. An evil blacker than anything you could possibly imagine. It’s out there in those woods. Now, I know what you’re thinking—you’re thinking: Rev, wasn’t it you who led us here in the first place? And yes, it was. Perfect, or as perfect as we can expect in this fleshy realm. I tried to give that perfection to you.” His voice grew deeper and slightly wrathful. “I laid down my life for you. I’ve practically died every day to give you peace. And do you have that peace? Sister Conkwright, do you feel it?”

  “I do not,” Nell Conkwright said, startled to have been called upon.

  “And you blame me—no, no, don’t answer that. I know. His eye on the sparrow, Sister.” Amos set his finger below his eyelid and pulled down, exposing the bloodshot white. “Now, why and how did this evil descend upon us? We who are the chosen, our lives given to the pursuance of good and holy matters? But aaaah, the devil, he is sly. He hunts for apathy and sloth and dines out on it. He peers deep into our hearts and finds the evil lurking there. It is his sweetest nectar, oh yes.”

  The chapel began to warm. Sweat collected on the upper lips and foreheads of the congregants. Their eyes had that dull sheen Amos knew well. They were enrapt. They were practically drooling. Amos smiled inwardly. He was going to make them pay for their disobedience. He’d make them squirm for what they had done to him. For scaring him and stripping his power away, even for a moment.

  “I’m here to talk corruption, Brothers and Sisters! Corruption of the spirit. The insidious sort, the corruption that rusts you from the inside out. From the outside, oh yes! Once you let it in, aaaaah, ain’t it a devil to root out! And I’m here to tell you, corruption wormed its way into Little Heaven well before those things in the woods showed up. Oh yes! They just followed the stink of rotten souls, drawn like flies to a trash heap. How did that corruption get here, you ask? It was smuggled in the only way it ever can be—in hearts and minds and in souls. Your soul, Brother!” He stabbed his finger at Reggie Longpre, who flinched. “And yours, Sister!” Stabbing that same finger at Nell Conkwright, relishing her agonized expression. “And yours! And yours! And yours!”

  He slammed his palms down on the pulpit. His followers jolted in the pews.

  “A person’s a fool who continues to say that they’re winning when they’re losing,” he said, switching registers, turning calm. “At first I didn’t want to see that poison. I wouldn’t credit it. How could my own people, my chosen, welcome such filth into their souls? But I prayed that the Lord remove those scales from my eyes so that I could see clearly. And ye
ah, God did, and yeah, I did—oh, terrible clarity! I saw the bubbling river of spite flowing through the heart of Little Heaven. The paradise I built for you! The paradise I nearly died finding for you! The paradise some of you have defiled through treachery and sin!”

  Nobody spoke against him. He knew their secret hearts. Who had stepped out on whom, who had stolen and lied and cheated and done villainy against their fellow man. That had always been the price of entry to join his inner sanctum—Tell me your secrets, my child. As God knows, so must I. They had all paid that price, willingly.

  “Sister Redhill. Stand up.”

  Maude Redhill rose from the pew. Her husband dead, her boys missing. Her face looked washed out and used up, like burnt pot roast with a wig on it. Amos almost grinned at this mental image.

  “What do you deserve, Sister Redhill?”

  “What do I—?” she parroted back bewilderedly.

  “Deserve, Sister. And ooooh, ain’t that a slippery slope? When it stops being about what we can give to the Lord and our fellow man and starts to be about what we need, deserve, in our hungry little hearts? So what is it, Sister? Tell me true.”

  After a while, the stupid bitch spat out, “We deserve peace. We all came here for peace.”

  “And we’ve— Have we had it?”

  “No. Not for some time, Reverend.”

  “And you blame me for that. Don’t you, Sister?”

  She started to twist, her hands knotted at her sides. Amos favored her with a death’s-head grin.

  “Oh yes, you do. You, and the person next to you, and the person next to him. All of you. Your hearts turned calloused against me. Your prophet. Your daddy. The one true mouthpiece of the Lord. You abandoned me and threw in with the outsiders. After all I did for you,” he said furiously, flecks of spittle leaping from his lips. “You ungrateful wretches.”

  You will see, deceivers. You will see what you have wrought, all of you.

  He closed his eyes, becoming peaceful. “Could I detach myself? Of course, yes. I could detach myself from all of you. Why not?” He shook his head. “No, no, no, no, no-no-NO! I never detach myself from any of your troubles. I’ve always taken your troubles right on my shoulders. And I’m not going to change that now.”

  The eyes of his congregation shone up wetly at him. A powerful loathing ripped through his guts at the sight of their cringing, craven need, their faces looking like a bunch of stepped-on dog turds.

  “You must wonder where I’ve been these last hours. Well, I’m gonna tell you. Last night, at my lowest point, I heard a Voice,” he said. “It was not the voice of the Lord. It was unspeakably cold. Cruel. I followed that Voice out into the woods.”

  A low murmur flooded through the congregation.

  “Was I scared, Brothers and Sisters? Yes. Did I go anyway? Yes. To protect you. My children.” He let this sink in. “I walked in a daze. I came to a small clearing. A creature stood there. A figure of pure darkness.”

  The current of unease rippling through the congregation intensified. Amos let their fear ferment and ripen. He savored the dread that sat plainly on their faces—the sniveling children’s faces most especially.

  “Its smell washed over me. The stink of corpses in a charnel house. It spoke. Never have I heard its equal. Scabrous, sharp as a razor. It hurt just to listen to it. I asked it what it wanted. It lifted one hand and pointed. But not at me. Oh no.”

  Amos let it sit. He withheld it. Tension mounted inside the packed chapel.

  “Who?” said Doc Lewis in wretched agony. “Who does it want?”

  Amos pitched his voice at the perfect octave: almost a whisper, but still loud enough that the peanut gallery could hear.

  “The children. It wants your children.”

  The congregation erupted. Mothers threw their arms around their snot-nosed offspring. Grown men whimpered in their seats like petrified infants.

  “It wants your babies, mothers. It wants your sons and daughters. It wants to take them into the woods and”—the mildest of shrugs—“engage in deviltry.”

  “You can’t let it take the children!” someone shrieked.

  “What did they ever do?” shouted Brother Conkwright.

  “The sins of the father . . .” the Reverend gravely intoned.

  They were whipped into a frenzy. Bug-eyed and quivering, all of them. The children were blubbering in their mothers’ arms. Oh, how perfectly fitting, thought Amos.

  “It asked for the children,” Amos went on over their donkey-like bleats. “It said that if we gave them to it, the rest of us would be spared.”

  A collective wail went up, shuddering the roof beams. Amos laid his head down. To the congregants, it might have looked as though their prophet had become overwhelmed. But he was smiling, and he couldn’t let them see it. His body shook. Was he crying? No, he was laughing, hard enough to shed tears.

  He raised his head. Tears of mirth stained his cheeks, but his buffoonish congregants surely mistook them for those of sorrow. He set his face in an expression of sadness . . . Slowly, he let it change into one of steely resolve.

  “Do you think I accepted its terms? Would I not have been justified, considering your venomous behavior towards your loving prophet? Or should I turn the other cheek, as our Lord commands? Well . . . ? Well?”

  They goggled at him, expecting something. Watery eyes, drool-wet lips. They revolted him. He might as well have been sermonizing to a writhing mass of maggots.

  “Brothers and Sisters, I quaked. My soul was at stake. But I stared right back at that foul thing and I said, No!” He thumped his fist on the pulpit. “NO! No, you will not take our children! NO! NO! I will not let you have them, demon from below!”

  His people broke into rousing applause, clapping so hard Amos was sure they’d break their spastic hands.

  “Praise be!” someone shouted.

  “Shelter us in your arms!” cried someone else.

  “NO, demon, you won’t win this battle!” Amos thundered. “For we have the Lord Almighty on our side! He is watching from His heavenly seat, and He will not let an abomination such as you take our most treasured prize!”

  “We raise our hands to the Lord!” Maude Redhill screamed, her thick suety face awash with tears. “Daddy, we love you!”

  “We will fight you on the battlements, hell spawn!” Amos said.

  “Hallelujah!” the congregation responded.

  “We will fight you on the plains!”

  “Praise our prophet!”

  Amos shushed them. “Say. Say. Say peace, my children.”

  “Peace,” they intoned.

  “And finally the hell beast said, I will have them! Then it was gone, leaving a sour note of brimstone. I then returned to Little Heaven. My task was clear.”

  The lips of a worshipper in the third row moved in a silent plea: Help us, prophet. Amos could scarcely recall the man’s name. Earl something-or-other. Earl or Merle. Earl or Merle was stumpy, with a prematurely bald, ovoid head. Earl the Pearl. Amos did not care about Earl. Earl was weak. They were all weak. They were broken and expected him to fix them. They were human trash. Wasted lives, wastes of skin. He was everything to them, and they meant nothing to him. There was not a thing worth harvesting from them anymore.

  And so, the field had to be razed. In a way, what was about to happen would be the best thing for them all.

  He gripped the pulpit. “What are you without me?”

  He needed to hear them say it.

  “Nothing,” said Reggie Longpre, his voice clear as a bell.

  “Nothing,” went the echo.

  Amos said, “Without me, what meaning would your lives have?”

  “None at all,” spoke the people of Little Heaven.

  “That’s right. I’m the best thing you’ll ever have.”

  Wild applause. Nell Conkwright shouted, “Thank you for everything, prophet! You are the only. The only. I am sorry for my trespasses.”

  “Sit down and be quiet,” he tol
d them all coldly. They sat at once, like some sentient organism of wretched servility.

  Amos signaled to Virgil, who wheeled in a cart from the vestry. On it sat a stack of plastic cups and two jugs of liquid, one red and the other purple.

  VIRGIL HAD USED a lot of sugar. An entire bag, holy jeez. The Reverend said it needed to be real sweet.

  Why so goddamn sugary? Virgil wondered. He didn’t ask. Followers did as they were told. Virgil had followed Cyril for years, and when Cy up and vanished, well, the Reverend was right there to fill the gap. And the good Rev—who was used to telling his followers what to do—never bothered to tell Virgil what he’d mixed into the Kool-Aid after Virgil had made it.

  Virgil used to drink the stuff as a kid. It was all his mother could afford. She mixed it so weak that it didn’t quite cover the sulfur taste of the well water. Redneck lemonade, she called it. Virgil and his brothers and sisters would sit on the porch, guzzling watery cherry Kool-Aid until the skin above their top lips was stained pink.

  He’d dumped in double the amount of sugar the recipe called for. The Reverend gave it a taste and said, “More.” Eventually it stopped dissolving—no matter how much Virgil stirred, the sugar crystals just sat at the bottom of the jugs like beach sand. The Reverend took the jug into the vestry and closed the door. When he came out, it looked the same, but there was a slight chemical odor to the Kool-Aid.

  “Don’t touch it,” the Rev had told him. “It’s for the children.”

  Virgil wouldn’t drink that shit on a dare. Just thinking about it made his teeth ache.