Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  “Get your gun,” she said once he was up.

  She walked to a spot thirty yards away. Then she turned to face him, waiting.

  “I’m going to shoot you now, Ebenezer Elkins,” she said calmly.

  He was still doubled over, sucking wind. “Wh-what?”

  “I’ll give you a moment to check your weapon and catch your wind. You tell me when you’re ready.”

  He stared at her, baffled. “Minerva, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Check your load, pal. We don’t got all day here.”

  Fire collected along the curve of the earth. Minerva closed her eyes and waited. She had felt it by then, for the first time ever: the sensation she would come to know as the Sharpening. She’d felt it during the firefight just passed. Everything had slowed down, and she was able to operate calmly within the cool center of chaos. Right at that moment, it felt the most natural thing in the world.

  Ebenezer dusted himself off. “You can’t possibly be serious.”

  She closed her eyes, feeling her newfound capacities surge through her. “Oh, I am. As a heart attack.”

  His voice changed—became accepting, as men such as him tended to be under even the most unreasonable circumstances. “May I ask why?”

  “No. You ready yet?”

  She opened her eyes. Eb stared searchingly at her across the starlit path.

  “I’m not ready, no. Not hardly. Minny, I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to understand, Ebenezer. You just have to skin that pistol, point, and shoot. Should be easy enough for you. Made a tidy living off it, haven’t you?”

  Ebenezer saw something then. A thin band of gold rimming her irises—though it was too dark and he too far away to note it with such precision—but yes, something deep-set and ineffable in her eyes. Something ticking ever clockwise, sharp and pure.

  “If we do this, I—I don’t shoot to wound,” he said. “I’m not built that way.”

  “You better do what you do, then.”

  The children peeked from beneath the tarp, their eyes wide and curious.

  “I don’t want to, Minerva. I will kill you. I’ll have to. Why end everything like this when we’ve been so lucky?”

  She didn’t answer him. Her hand fell to the Colt at her waist. Ebenezer tucked his own pistol into his waistband. His fingers danced above the grips. The fire was set to scream over the rise, devouring everything in its path.

  “Ready?” she said.

  “No. But I’m afraid I’ll be ready well before you are, milady.”

  They drew.

  She’s so fast was Ebenezer’s amazed thought.

  Minerva’s first shot tore through his leg just below his knee. He’d managed to clear the gun from his waistband, but her next shot clipped its barrel, sending it flying through the air. He uttered a shocked cry and fell back, clutching his knee. Blood pulsed through the neat hole in his pants.

  “Ah-fuuuuuuuuu—” was all he could get out.

  She hopped into the track machine again and came back to him with something in her hands. She flung it at his feet. He was in such pain, tears swimming in his eyes, that he could not make it out. She toed it a little closer. Some kind of dried reptile head. A snake, if he had to guess.

  “You killed my father in a shack near Yuba fourteen years ago,” she said simply.

  He stared at her gape-jawed, unable to comprehend.

  “And because you killed my father, my brother died. All on the same day.”

  “Who?” he managed to ask through gritted teeth.

  “Charles Atwater.”

  “But I didn’t . . .”

  Minerva cocked the pistol and pointed it between his eyes. “Think on it.”

  In time, he nodded. “Ah. A gambler . . . yes?” He winced, the pain in his knee drilling up and down his leg. “I was hired . . . to collect his debt.”

  “You were just doing your job, right?”

  “Of course. Had I known . . .”

  “How could you have known?” she said, softening just slightly.

  He dropped his head. Then he began to laugh. His shoulders hitched softly with it.

  “All this time, Minerva. You’ve been waiting on this moment?”

  She didn’t answer. What was the point? When Ebenezer looked up, he was smiling. “You got it out of your system, I trust?”

  “I don’t figure so, no.”

  “That would have been my guess.” He laughed again. “The whole time! Oh, but you are a patient viper.”

  Minerva walked to the machine and slung herself into the cab. “Scoot over,” she told Nate. She put the vehicle in gear. The fire glinted in the side-view mirror, bearing down.

  “What just happened?” Nate asked.

  “He said he wants to walk home.”

  Ebenezer’s voice rose over the onrushing fire: “Are we all square now, Minerva? Tell me we’re even now, at least!”

  She didn’t bother answering that, either.

  19

  THE REVEREND AMOS FLESHER screamed out of unconsciousness.

  It was dark. So very dark. Had he been dreaming? The dream itself was gone, but its outlines still clung to his mind: an inky spillage roiling with unseen bodies. He shivered. He was shirtless, his belly spilling over the waistband of his trousers.

  He was still here. His father’s room. The house of treasures. He saw a light a dozen yards off. A flashlight lay on the floor, pointing at the wall. The rock met at a perfect ninety-degree angle. Puzzling. His initial sense of this space was of a huge bubble inside the rock. But seeing the way the rock met, his mind reoriented its parameters: not an orb but a cube.

  Hell is a box.

  He recoiled. The voice had come from his own head—mirthless, a flat, deadened tone—but the words were so powerful that it felt as if they had been whispered into his ear. But when he turned and looked, only the darkness peered back.

  His legs were tacky with blood. How? It came back to him. The one-eyed bastard! Amos’s fingers roamed around to his spine. His fingertips touched flayed meat. He cried out in pain. Jesus Lord, merciful provider. The fucker had quartered him like a hog. He would bleed to death! He tried to call out, but his lips were waxy and his vocal cords shredded. Had he been screaming in his sleep?

  He tried to stand. Impossible. His legs were numb and useless; they might as well have been made of wood. Had the one-eyed fuck severed a nerve cluster in his spine?

  He hauled himself forward, fingers seeking purchase on the rock. One of his fingernails peeled off with a gluey snap, but it didn’t hurt one bit. He laughed again—what’s a fingernail? what’s a finger? what’s a toe?—and hauled his body on, singing an old hymn:

  O that day when freed from sinning, I shall see Thy lovely face;

  Clothed then in blood washed linen, how I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;

  Come, my Lord, no longer tarry, take my ransomed soul away;

  Send thine angels now to carry me to realms of endless day.

  He was near the flashlight when the first rope descended. He could identify it by the thin thread of light running through it, like an electric eel darting in a dark sea cave. The rope danced hypnotically in front of him. He smiled and laughed; he wanted to clap, it was such a neat performance. The rope grazed his shoulder. He gasped. What a wonderful sensation. Indescribably lovely. His mind burst with colors. Flowers holding hues that did not exist in nature bloomed in his head.

  This is Heaven, he thought rapturously. I must have died; this is my everlasting reward.

  The ropes spooled down from above. Dozens of them alighted on his flesh; his mind expanded with wonderments so massive that he struggled to contain them all. The ropes lifted him up. He had never felt such a profound sense of love and tenderness. They hoisted him effortlessly, his body drawn to a standing position in the center of the chamber—the box. His legs hung under him, useless deadweight; his arms were also immobilized. He could barely move except to wriggle his torso a little, but it hard
ly mattered. He was safe and warm and loved.

  Next: sounds from the far edge of the chamber. The moist shucking of a body across the stone. He stared around blearily, a kittenish smile on his face.

  Where was that coming from? What was—?

  It crawled through the flashlight beam. A baby . . . ? was the only conception his mind registered. Something determinedly dragging its pulpy pink body across the beam. Flesher blinked, peering closer. Its body shimmered, and he saw a different shape entirely. Something that reminded him of a wet, wadded-up dish towel. Grub-like, but with a lean articulation of limbs up and down its body—the legs of a centipede. Fat and ribbed with skin that was not baby pink but a rotted-banana black, with seeping boils all over. Its eyes were pinned on the Reverend with a malignancy of purpose, a singular hunger, and a hatred deeper than human fathoming.

  Then the shimmer ebbed and it was simply a baby again, chubby-cheeked and cute beyond belief. It humped through the flashlight beam, its feet pushing eagerly. He could hear it advancing toward him with a slick suction. A chill broke out over his body. He began to convulse in the harness of ropes, which held him in a gentle but stern embrace. He did not want that thing touching him. There was nothing in the world he could possibly want less. Better to let crows peck out his eyes; better to set wasps loose inside his mouth. Anything would be better than that horrible thing with its ancient shriveling stare.

  Hell is a box, hell is a box, hell is a—

  Something touched his naked calf. Now that he could feel. He tried to jerk his leg away, but it was useless. He couldn’t move an inch.

  Nonononono—

  The thing began to mount his leg. It skinned its way up gradually, as if savoring the ascent. Instead of a baby’s slack limbs, the appendages climbing his flesh felt more like a lobster’s spiny legs. Before long, the flashlight’s batteries would die. After that, the darkness would be total.

  The thing was at his knee now. It was making loud sucking sounds like an infant hungering for a big fat tit.

  Father must fill its belly, spoke a voice in his ear.

  Being eaten wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Not in the grand scheme of things. It would be absolutely horrible, of course, to be eaten alive by the thing now licking its way up his inner thigh, pausing to tease the head of his dangling fear-shrunk cock; it would be excruciatingly painful to be eaten piece by piece, and the pain would amplify until he was driven mad with it, in all likelihood . . . but still, there would be an end to it. There was only so much of him to consume.

  I have made the most terrible mistake, the Reverend thought.

  Amos Flesher sensed this thing would do something far worse than merely devour him. Something that sat well outside the rational bounds of human pain or madness. Its feasting would be deliriously slow and torturous in a way that would eclipse all taxonomies of pain known to flesh or mind. All he knew was that the suffering would be immense and utterly lonely—trapped in the despairing dark, no way to mark the years as they bled into decades while this thing broke him down piece by relentless piece.

  Please, he thought frenziedly. Don’t hurt me I’ll do anything be anything for you just don’t hurt me please God I don’t want you to hurt meeeeeee . . .

  I will not hurt you, came the cooing reply. I will love you. You will be loved deeper than you ever imagined possible.

  Love. Never in Amos’s life had a word held such a sinister undertone.

  The thing was muscling around his hips now, moving toward the wide slice in his back. The Reverend thrashed madly, his dead legs slapping together to make comical sounds. The ropes held him in place. Their warmth and wonderments had retreated. They had become but dutiful tools of restraint.

  The thing slipped inside his opened flesh. Teasingly so—inching just a cunt’s hair inside of him, as if wishing to savor it this first time. The pain was monolithic; his brain shrieked, every synapse shuddering. The Reverend squealed breathlessly; the sound fled up into the darkness to die. The thing was squirming inside of him rather energetically now, a birth in reverse; the Reverend felt his organs being displaced as the thing pushed doggedly inside—

  Finally, its little feet sucked through the slit, which then closed over, the lips gumming shut on their own. The thing shuddered contentedly inside of him, its body flexing minutely as it enjoyed its new home.

  For a long empty moment, nothing. Then: the smallest and most timid voice.

  Let us begin, shall we?

  MICAH COULD HEAR THE SCREAMS over the roar of the forest fire. They boiled out of the black rock. They were followed by silence and then—most chillingly—by a prolonged laugh.

  “Did you hear that?” Ellen asked.

  Micah nodded.

  “The Reverend?”

  “I suppose.”

  They spent the night at the mouth of the cleft as the forest burned. The wind was gusting and the trees dry; Micah wouldn’t be surprised to hear that half the state had gone up. The heat intensified. They were forced to retreat into the cleft. It was much cooler inside the rock. Micah had a sense that even if the fire was raging right outside, it was always cool and wet inside this particular rock. He closed his eye, his eyelid lit by the mellow orange of the distant inferno. He hoped Minerva had made it out with the children.

  The fire swept north and west the next day. Ellen managed to sleep for a few hours while Micah kept watch. The burned trees continued to glow until a heavy rain bucketed down. Columns of steam rose from the blackened forest floor. When the downpour cleared, they walked the wet sand to the edge of the forest. The tusks of what had been fifty-foot pines jutted from the earth.

  “Should we start walking?” Ellen wondered. “We shouldn’t get lost, at least.”

  “The fire could still be burning underground. In the tree roots.”

  “Well?”

  They agreed to set off before evening. They had no water or food; their lips were cracked and white, the first stages of dehydration. Maybe the well at Little Heaven had survived the blaze. They could draw a few ashy mouthfuls.

  They had just set off when the air filled with the thacka-thacka of chopper blades. A search helicopter crested the western horizon, bearing steadily toward them. Ellen waved her arms. The pilot swooped low overhead, buzzing their position.

  “He must have seen us,” Ellen said.

  Micah nodded. “He will bank around and land nearby.”

  “You don’t seem all that happy.”

  “I do not wish to talk to the authorities.”

  He began to walk toward Little Heaven again.

  “Micah?”

  “You go with them,” he said.

  She trotted over to him. “You’re not serious.” When he did not reply: “Micah, you could die. After all this—”

  But she could see he was resolute. Mule-headed to the end, this man.

  “Then I’ll come with you.”

  He shook his head. “Go with them. I will be fine.”

  “How will I know that?”

  He took her hand. The gesture seemed to surprise both of them.

  “You will know because I will come find you, Ellen.”

  “You promise?” She held a hand up. “Don’t answer that.”

  “I will not. But you know the answer.”

  She nodded. “I’ll see you then, Micah.”

  “Yes. You will.”

  She watched him walk into the landscape. He did not melt into the trees, there being no living trees left. But the fabric of his trench coat liquefied into the blackness surrounding it, becoming one with the charred earth after a few hundred yards.

  “You better get your ass back to me!” Ellen shouted.

  Twenty minutes later, a helicopter cut down from the pristine sky. And by then Micah Shughrue was only a name.

  1

  High-Alert Bulletin from the New Mexico State Forestry, October 21, 1966:

  WILDFIRE IN SOUTH-CENTRAL NM

  BLAZE RAGING ON HILLSIDES AND DENSELY WOODED ZONES IN BLA
CK MOUNTAIN WILDERNESS AREA ABUTTING LINCOLN NATIONAL FOREST . . . UNKNOWN CAUSE . . . THUNDERSTORMS PRECEDING. LIGHTNING STRIKE POSSIBLE. WINDS GUSTING TO HIGHS OF 70 MPH . . . CATASTROPHIC BLAZE POTENTIAL . . . ALL EMERGENCY FIRE PERSONNEL ARE TO REPORT TO . . .

  * * *

  Excerpt from US Department of Agriculture Report: “Black Lands Fire Summary,” published January 15, 1967:

  OVERVIEW

  The Black Lands fire was believed to have been started by a lightning strike in the Black Mountain Wilderness Area on the evening of October 21, 1966; suppression activities were initiated by US Forest Service firefighters based in Lincoln National Forest. The fire raged through that night and the day following, aided by high winds that lifted embers beyond the initial fire line, leading to a catastrophic blaze that claimed a total of 53,890 acres (36,922 on Lincoln National Forest, 4,355 on Mescalero Apache tribal land, 3,002 of New Mexico land, and the remainder on private land), plus 354 private dwellings and 43 larger structures.

  Primary entities involved in responding to the fire were the US Forest Service, Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, Lincoln County Office of Emergency Services, and the State of New Mexico (NM).

  Somewhat strangely, the town on the southern edge of the Black Mountain range—a small village, Grinder’s Switch—was left unscathed. The fire burned down the eastern and southern flanks of the range, crossing a wide river running through the lowlands, but failed to reach Grinder’s Switch.

  No emergency workers perished fighting the blaze. But several civilian casualties were later reported; the documented circumstances of those fatalities can be found in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Reports G-55A and G-55B, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Dossiers 0-99[A-G], which are available to authorized personnel upon approval.

  * * *

  News Item from the Clovis (NM) News Journal, October 23, 1966:

  MASSACRE AT BACKWOODS RELIGIOUS SETTLEMENT? UNCONFIRMED REPORTS SUGGEST DOZENS DEAD, CHILDREN SOLE SURVIVORS

  Tragedy appears to have struck an isolated religious compound located in the Black Mountain Wilderness Area.