Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  “Then what?”

  “I have done bad things, too.”

  “You’re talking about human evil. It’s different.”

  He did not appear to agree. “We all owe, Minerva. We owe and we are all paying, every day. What else is life but the repayment? But them, what could they owe?”

  “Jesus, Shug. What is it you think you owe?”

  “They are children, Minny. Only children.”

  “Yes.”

  “All lives are not equal. Some are worth more than others.”

  She said, “I won’t argue it with you.”

  “You could return to Little Heaven.”

  “I could, yeah,” she said. “But I won’t. I’ll go with you. But I’m telling you right now that I don’t know if I can follow you all the way down there, right to the bottom.”

  Micah pressed a finger to his lips. Minerva held her breath. She heard it then—footsteps.

  These came from the same direction as the others had—from Little Heaven. Two sets of legs passed this time. An agonized wheeze accompanied them, two sets of lungs heaving.

  Micah and Minerva waited until those legs had passed before crawling out from under the trees. Minerva pulled Ellen’s pistol. Micah shone the flashlight up the path, pinning the backs of two men in its beam fifty yards ahead. The men froze. Slowly, they turned.

  “Greetings, fellow travelers,” the Reverend said with sunny good cheer.

  Bloody as butchers, the two of them. The good Reverend’s hair was slapped on either side of his skull like a muskrat pelt. He was smiling, wide-eyed. Virgil looked like he was ready to burst out crying.

  The Reverend reached into his waistband and put something in Virgil’s hand. He stood on his tippy-toes, whispering into Virgil’s ear—

  “KILL THEM, MY SON,” the good Reverend said.

  The weight of the pistol in Virgil’s hand. A good weight—the weight of finality. Virgil could end it all now. For himself, the Reverend, the one-eyed wonder, and the skinny dyke bitch. End them all. Him, Virgil Quincy Swicker. He had that power now. Maybe that would be the best thing. Better than following that abomination deeper into the woods.

  It was all Virgil could do to not put the barrel in his own mouth and pull the trigger. He wanted to do that. He couldn’t get the image of it out of his head. Its enormous body with its flap-a-dangly arms and long, cartoonish legs. Its head and its mouth and its horrible, terrible eyes. How the notes of its flute—a bleached femur bone, it looked like, with holes riddled through it—roused the children from their drugged sleep. They had all gotten up as one, linked hands, and danced into the woods following that horrific piper.

  Seeing that, something in Virgil gave over to the madness. He followed the piper into the woods, blood storming through his veins. It didn’t even feel like he was walking—more like he’d stepped onto an enormous buried conveyor belt that was stubbornly pulling him along. At some point, he stared up into a tree and saw, or thought he’d seen, a body glossed by the moonlight. Cyril’s body, just maybe—Cy, his brother from another mother!—spinning bonelessly, lifelessly, at the end of a thick bough. Cy looked like some awful Christmas tree ornament hung by a giant malicious child. Seeing this, a trapdoor sprang open inside Virgil’s head; beneath that door was a stinking yellow room whose bristling and undulating floor suggested that something huge was moving quarrelsomely beneath it . . .

  Things had gone a little hazy after that. The minutes or hours slipped by until . . . until . . . until . . .

  And now here he was. In the woods with the Reverend and a gun in his hand.

  “Kill them both.” The Reverend’s honeyed voice in his ear. “End them.”

  Virgil was crying. The tears came easily. He barely realized it. When was the last time he’d really sobbed? As a teenager, when he found the body of a stray dog under the bushes in Union Park, kicked to death by some sadistic shitheel. He hadn’t cried since. Never seemed a deep enough need. But he did so now—for the dead fools at Little Heaven; for their children, who were fated for something far worse; for his buddy Cyril, who had been turned into a fucking tree ornament; and for his own dumbshit self, who didn’t have the brains to see a way out of this awful muddle.

  The gun came up. He saw it there at the end of his arm, but it didn’t feel like part of him. He pulled the trigger. It was as easy as breathing, it really was.

  The bullet creased the air inches from Minerva’s skull. The pop! filled her ears. Her own gun jerked up automatically. She fired. Virgil didn’t go down. He was walking toward her, sobbing the same words over and over. I’m sorry, it might have been. He was bawling like a baby.

  He shot again, missing his mark. Pop! She fired and also missed. Her hand trembled. Stop it, goddamn it, stop shaking just st—

  A bullet smashed into the ash between her spread legs. She couldn’t stop the shakes. Virgil was walking and firing. He was half blind from crying, but it wouldn’t matter; a few more strides and it would be pretty much a point-blank proposition.

  Her finger froze on the trigger. She couldn’t—couldn’t—

  Micah snatched the gun out of her hand. Bang. Virgil’s head snapped back in a mist of red. His body was flung with such force that his left foot was ejected from his boot. He rolled bonelessly to the edge of the path. He did not get up.

  “Shug, I’m sorry.” A wave of adrenaline shakes rolled through her. She stared at her gun hand, the one that had betrayed her. “I don’t know what . . .”

  She read it in his eyes. You are not made for this, Minny. There was nothing cruel in his appraisal. It wasn’t a slight on her toughs or spine—simply that, in the cut, she couldn’t pull the trigger. And he could.

  They walked over to Virgil. His big toe poked through a hole in his woolen sock. Merciless, what a bullet could do. There was no need to check for a pulse. The top of Virgil’s head was missing. Everything above his eyes, which were still filmy with tears, staring blankly into the cold night sky.

  13

  THIS IS ONE BLUBBERING NINNY who’s better off dead was Amos’s thought as he put the gun into Virgil’s hand.

  The idiot’s eyes were all swimmy as he made with the waterworks. Amos had to swallow his revulsion. Virgil had been useful in a pinch, but now he was deadweight. In fact, Amos had been speculating about how to get rid of the dummy. And now, out of the blue, the perfect opportunity—two birds with one stone.

  Virgil nodded at the Reverend’s simple instructions, docile as a lamb. Then he began to fire. Amos didn’t wait to see the result. He scampered up the incline, slipping on dead pine needles. He laughed thinly—a-hee, a-hee-heeee—because there was something deliciously funny about the events of the past hours . . . and because he couldn’t stop laughing, even when he bit his lip so hard that the skin tore and blood gushed—he just kept on howling, the shrill gasping notes pouring out of him.

  Job 8:21, he thought. God will fill thy mouth with laughing, and thy lips with rejoicing! Hallelujah, praised be, and pass the spuds!

  He ran as fast as his legs would carry him as the gunshots continued to ring out from behind. Pop-papop-pop-poppoppop! The shots abruptly stopped; the woods ran thick with silence. Good-bye, Virgil! See you in the funny pages, Skinny Bitch! Farewell, One-Eye! Godspeed to none of you, and may Satan feast on your genitals in hell!

  He hurried toward the black rock. He was not tired, and his pace did not flag. He was filled with a limitless reservoir of energy. Even though his legs were leaden and his chest searing, he felt like those niggers in Africa who had developed incredible cardiovascular endurance from being chased across the veld by hungry lions. He could run a million miles!

  His eyes momentarily slipped shut. The wondrous creature lay there, imprinted on his eyelids. Oh, what a sight that had been.

  You are beautiful.

  This had been Amos’s awestruck thought. The thing had to be twelve feet tall. Long, articulate legs and arms. Its flesh was smooth as porcelain. Its belly was cask-like, as if pregn
ant with some unfathomable offspring. Amos’s heart quailed at the sight of it easing through the trees. Its head was enormous. Its mouth stretched across the entirety of its face; it looked to be smiling, but as its mouth followed the upward curve of its skull, a smile must be its default expression. Its eyes were ineffably black and lusterless, like buttons: Amos pictured the four little holes in their centers where a seamstress could loop her thread.

  It had come through the trees slowly and somehow playfully. There was a hint of shyness in its movements. Amos’s eyes had quivered in their sockets, as if his peepers were under some enormous pressure, jittering like roaches in a hot pan. He knew why his eyes were struggling, too: they were trying to see the shape behind the shape. The creature had another face, and it lurked beneath the one Amos was allowed to see—but his frail human eyes and his inadequate and too-literal mind were preventing him from seeing its more breathtaking true shape.

  It had bent over the sleeping children, sniffing them as a coyote might a moldering carcass; the slits in the middle of its face dilated. Its black tongue made a sandpapery note as it slid over its fleshless lips. It had no teeth to speak of; rags of wet tissue dangled and swayed in its mouth, reminding Amos of the fibrous pith inside a pumpkin.

  It then produced a flute. Its fingers danced nimbly along its length, coaxing from it notes that raised the hairs on the nape of Amos’s neck. The children had stood up all at once. Their eyes were still closed, but their bodies were alert. They linked hands. The creature began to dance. It was both horrible and magnetic: the strange articulation of its limbs, the mad glee with which it jigged. The children mimicked it, their legs and arms moving unnaturally.

  The thing danced into the woods. The children followed. They went quickly, their feet seeming not to touch the ground. Virgil only stood in a slack-mouthed stupor. Amos shook him—when that failed, he slapped Virgil hard across the face. The dimwit’s eyes unfogged, the faintest glimmer coming back into them.

  “We must follow, my son.”

  Virgil swallowed with effort. “Yeah. Follow. I can do that.”

  And they had done so, shuffling along in pursuit of the thing. Until they had been set upon by the troublesome outsiders—but those two ended up doing Amos a great service by erasing a vestigial player from the proceedings and hopefully wiping themselves out in the bargain. Everything was coming up Flesher!

  The trees now gave way to a clearing. The moonlight settled across an empty expanse—sand scalloped by the wind and the black rock standing watchfully in the distance. In that same moonlight, he could see small footprints in the sand. He followed them, his heart singing.

  He had done his duty. Now he would reap the reward. What form would it take? He had no use for money or renown, the common ambitions that common men spent their common lives pursuing. He desired knowledge. An understanding of how this world—or the worlds beyond it—operated. A peek behind the curtain. He wanted to see God—not the one his worshippers cowered before, either. The God that had led Amos out here in the first place. The God of Flies and Blood. He wanted to thank that God for making Amos Flesher just the way he was.

  The footprints led straight to the black rock. A quiet hum emanated from it. He followed the footprints around the rockface, glancing back to see if anyone was in pursuit. He paused. There—far away but visible. The sweep of a flashlight? He bared his teeth. The outsiders. The bastards. He could only hope that Virgil had killed one of them and perhaps hurt the other. But the one-eyed man struck Amos as a fellow who’d be calm in a shoot-out. No matter. Once he had claimed his just reward, Amos would deal with them. Oh yes, he could take his time with it. There was nobody out here to help them.

  Amos picked up the pace, swallowing the blood from his torn lip. The rock tilted ninety degrees as it opened onto a fresh face. He jogged along it. His sweat mixed with the lanolin in his pomade and slid down his cheeks in gooey runners. He wiped them away absentmindedly and crooned an old gospel ditty.

  The Father sent the Son

  A ruined world to save;

  Man meted to the Sinless One

  The cross—the grave:

  Blest Substitute from God!

  Wrath’s awful cup He drained:

  Laid down His life, and e’en the tomb’s—

  Amos tripped and stumbled, arms outflung. He found his feet again and carried on, singing a new song that he made up as he went. His rich baritone carried out over the wastes.

  Fuck the Father, fuck the Son, and fuck the Holy Ghost;

  Fuck the bearded carpenter, and fuck his lordly host;

  Fuck the baby Jesus, that wormy little runt;

  And fuck the whore of Baby-looooon, yes fuck her greasy cuuuunt—

  He reached a cleft in the rock. An odd glow poured from its mouth. The footsteps carried on into the enveloping darkness that existed past the entry.

  “You have been fiddling. Fiddling, fiddling, fiddling . . . ,” said a familiar voice.

  It sat twenty feet to Amos’s left, crouched on the sand. The moon touched its awesome contours, reflecting off the egg-like dome of its skull. It spoke in a perfect mimicry of Sister Muriel.

  “You always were a filthy boy, Amos Flesher. The filthiest, by far. Do you know what will happen if you keep fiddling with your dirty stick, hmm? It will fall off. That’s right! Snap off like a winter icicle, it will. And you will be so ashamed, won’t you? You will have no choice but to bury it in the yard, as a dog does with a bone. Your uuuu-rhine will simply fall from the hole where your little stick once poked, Amos. Yes, as sure as Christ sits in Heaven.”

  Amos took a step back. He realized right then how alone he was, miles and miles from anyone. “I did what you asked.”

  The creature made a sound like the chittering of an insect. “I didn’t ask anything of you,” it said as Sister Muriel.

  A thin wire of unease threaded into Amos’s heart. The thing chittered on and on. It was too dark for Amos to tell if the sound was coming from some part of its odd anatomy or if this was its version of laughter.

  “Not me, no, no, no,” it said, this time in a voice that might have been its own: high and breathy, the voice of a baby who had learned to enunciate its words. “My father asked . . . my father, my father, my daddykins . . .”

  “Your . . . your father?”

  The thing squatted in the sand, repeating those two words over and over. “My father, my father, my father . . .”

  The understanding rocked Amos. This thing was no more than the lapdog of a far greater entity. Comprehending this, the sight of it—its bloated belly, its bird legs and button eyes—now filled Amos with disgust. Hunched in the dark, babbling the same two idiot words: My father, my father. It was nothing but an overgrown mynah bird with a gift for impressions. It made Amos sick to look at it now—no different from those soft-brained children at the orphanage he’d delighted in jabbing with a pin.

  “Where?” he said to it. “Where, you filthy thing?”

  The thing raised its arm, one exquisitely long finger pointing at the cleft.

  “My father is waiting.”

  MICAH ROUNDED THE BLACK ROCK. Minerva lagged behind, still shaken from the encounter with Virgil. He pressed on without her. Maybe it was best she stay out of it.

  Micah’s mind was cluttered; he lacked a great deal of information, and under normal circumstances he would retreat and regroup. But there was no time for that and he was fueled by a rage more profound than anything he’d experienced in years. Worse than what he’d felt for Seaborn Appleton or even his old Captain Beechwood.

  He would kill the Reverend. He should have done it the first time he’d laid eyes on the man. He had practically smelled the crazy seeping out of him—it had a scent, true craziness did: the stench of old flooring rotted through with cat piss. Micah had sensed the malice festering in the fuming wastes of the Reverend’s soul, and he should have put a bullet in his brain right then and there . . . but Charlie and Otis had taken his sidearm, robbing him of the o
pportunity.

  Abruptly, Micah came to the cleft. He had been so taken up with thoughts of vengeance that he lost track of time. He shone his flashlight into the crevice. Moody blue shadows gave way to deeper enveloping blacks. He spun on his heel, alerted by a klaxon blaring in his unconscious mind—

  Something loomed motionlessly out in the sand. A huge humanlike form plated in moonlight.

  “Fine evening for a perambulation, eh, Private?”

  It was the voice of Captain Beechwood. The thing issued a terrible flapping sound like an enormous cockroach beating its wings.

  “My father is waiting,” it said in Beechwood’s voice. “My father will just let some air into those children, Private Shughrue. Just a little air. My father is thirsty. So thirsty. Hungry. Yes. Meat.” Its mouth stretched wide, splitting its entire face in two; then its jaws snapped shut with a sound like wood planks spanked together. “Meat for the feast. My father, my father, my father . . .”

  It pointed at the cleft. Micah took a few steps in that direction, his eye never leaving the thing. It did not move or try to stop him. In fact, it appeared to be urging him inside. Micah aimed his flashlight into the gap again. Dust sifted down, sparkling in the beam.

  “My father is waiting . . .”

  He entered the cleft. Beads of sweat popped on his brow. He held a hand out for balance; it brushed the cave wall and he recoiled, disturbed once again by the soft and somehow fleshy character of the rock. It felt like the skin of a sick old man, smoothed and made clammy with age and disease. The darkness sucked in on him with unnatural avidity; it hungered after the feeble beam shed by his flashlight, nibbling at its glow with invisible black teeth.

  He passed under the colony of olms and came to the precipice rather quickly. The rope ladder clattered against the rock, down and down, stirred by a subterranean wind—or by someone who had recently climbed down it. He stared down to the tunnel below. An odor drifted up, almost too faint to credit. A smell that spoke of childhood. A mix of bubble gum and dime-store perfume, the blood off skinned knees and chocolate coins wrapped in shiny foil. It was all of those things, but corrupted somehow. Mixed with the smell that permeates an old folks’ home: sickness and dust and the yellowing reek of bodies rotting from the inside out. The smell of living death.