by Nick Cutter
The compound—dubbed Little Heaven by its overseer, the Reverend Amos Flesher, most recently of San Francisco—sat in the hills of the Black Mountain range. The compound was accessible via an access road or a secondary footpath that wound up through the hills.
Information remains spotty in the wake of the Black Lands fire, which emergency crews continue to battle in the southernmost reaches of the state. The compound burned in the fire, along with tens of thousands of neighboring acreage. Details emerging in the aftermath come from the remaining eyewitnesses—the children of Little Heaven, who appear to have been rescued by an unknown Good Samaritan or Samaritans.
The children arrived in the town of Grinder’s Switch yesterday, in the early-morning hours. They showed up in a specialized vehicle that had been used to transport goods and equipment to the compound. The unidentified driver left the vehicle at the Grinder’s Switch police station, where a single constable, William Jeffers, was on duty. The driver and any confederates were gone before Jeffers could confirm their identities.
According to Jeffers, the children were in a state of shock. He was unable to get much out of them about their ordeal.
“Only one of them had anything to say,” said Jeffers. “A girl, six or so, name as yet unconfirmed. She said they were all dead. The grown-ups. When I asked how, she said the Reverend killed them all. Every one.”
It is unclear if this witness’s story is factual or the product of shock. Nor is it yet known exactly how many people resided at Little Heaven.
The News Journal will diligently update this story as details emerge.
* * *
HOSPITAL GENERAL INCIDENT REPORT FORM
Cibola General Hospital
1016 Roosevelt Ave.
Grants, NM 87020
Prepared by: Rhonda Popplewell, HR Liaison
Date of Incident: October 23, 1966. Approx. 2:15 a.m.
Location: Hospital pharmacy, basement level
Nature of Incident: Assault/forcible imprisonment
Description of Incident
At approx. 2:15 a.m. on October 23rd, George Lennox, 55 y/o, night-shift pharmacist, was violently assaulted by an unknown man. According to Lennox, his assailant approached in a wheelchair. Quoting Lennox: “Black fellow. He was wet and filthy and covered in blood, wheeling himself down the hall.” When Lennox informed said assailant that he would need to go upstairs to the emergency ward, his assailant replied, quote: “Can’t do that, old chum. I’m behind in my insurance payments.” When Lennox insisted sharply that the man comply, going so far as to grip his wheelchair, the man sprang upon Lennox and beat him roundly about the face. Subdued and now fearful for his life, Lennox allowed himself to be led into the pill lockup. The man directed Lennox to fill a bag with various pharmaceuticals, plus items liberated from the general dispensary. A comprehensive itemization is attached. Lennox noted that his assailant had a bullet wound near his left knee; the items taken would seem to address the treatment of such a wound.
The assailant was roughly six feet tall and a hundred and eighty pounds. Black, with long unkempt black hair. Brown eyes. In his mid- to late thirties. He spoke with an English accent. He did not evidence signs of drug addiction. Lennox describes the man as being cordial, with a sunny disposition despite his injuries; still, there was never a moment where Lennox did not actively fear for his life.
The man carried on a spirited conversation while Lennox collected his items. He seemed especially focused on the negative behavior of a certain woman; Lennox suggested to me that this woman could have been the man’s wife or girlfriend, and that she may have been the one who shot him. I have shared this information with the sheriff’s department.
After Lennox had put the items into a sack, the man tied him to the lockup cage with Tensor bandages. The knot work was quite good; it took Lennox thirty minutes to twist free, by which point his assailant was gone. The wheelchair was found by the laundry exit.
Report submitted to: Donald Grubman, Chief Executive Officer
* * *
Letter postmarked December 15, 1968. Old Ditch, Arizona:
Dear Minerva,
How goes the war, milady? Are you sleeping well?
Hah.
I survived. But I suppose you must know that. You can feel it, as I can feel you. And Micah, too, when the wind blows a certain way. It’s blowing that way now. Cold, yes? Winter, though not anything like the winters of my youth. Winter in Arizona means you might want to stop taking ice in your tea. But it’s the Yuletide season and I suppose I’m maudlin. Or wistful. Such a fine thread between the two. They don’t celebrate Christmas with much gusto in these parts. It’s an old folks’ town and Christmas is for the young, isn’t it? But there are lights, garlands, the odd tree. Another year gone past. Ah, well. God can take all the years I’ve got left. I cannot see much use for them.
I wish to say I’m sorry. I know that will mean nothing to you. I know that it fixes not a goddamn thing. I wish I had that capacity to go back in time, back to when I was a churlish child, a WISEASS, as you Yanks would say, and just . . . be better. Set myself down a proper path, one that didn’t lead to so much bloodshed and regret. I had people in my life who tried to put me on that good path. Shame I didn’t listen to them nearly enough.
George Orwell wrote that at fifty, everyone has the face they deserve. But some of us get our just deserts earlier than that.
I killed your father. He was a gambler. A common enough vice. Nothing a man ought to be killed over. But I did. I shot him. I could tell you that I did it as a function of my work, that I was no more than an automaton fulfilling its purpose, but every man has his own agency. I didn’t have to kill him. But I had the ability to and he had sinned in a very small way and I felt it fair at the time to take his life for that.
I do not know how my killing your father caused your brother to die. We did not have much time to discuss it, me with your bullet in my leg and you with those children to drive to safety—-which you did, as I was heartened to read about. They all lived. I hope they have grandparents and aunts and uncles to take them in. I hope they forget everything they saw. Children’s minds are supple, isn’t that what the headshrinks say? A child’s mind can be erased and rewritten, fresh. Little Etch A Sketch brains. I hope so.
The fire almost got me. It was a near thing. I dragged myself down to the river. It was running four feet deep. I submersed myself and breathed through a reed—-a REED, my dear, like some cartoon character! Ash fell on the river’s surface; it ran so thick and black that I couldn’t see up, like being sunken in a river of ink. But the fire raged past quite quickly and when it was over I managed to drag myself down to Grinder’s Switch. My knee—-ha! A flesh wound. I’ve had worse. Sometimes I wonder if you shot me in the perfect manner, Minerva my dear. Enough to hurt me and leave me with a constant reminder, but not quite kill me. Were you merciful in the cut? Or was it just luck? I like to think it was the former. If not, don’t wake the dreamer from his dream.
In the commotion, nobody made much note of me. Just another wide-eyed survivor. It was an easy enough matter to steal a car. And later, some medical supplies to patch me up until I could visit Shughrue’s veterinarian friend. I passed out a few times from the pain, but I survived. I don’t know what business I had doing so, but I did.
I think about those days, my darling. What we saw. What we did. What was done to us. I think about evil. Our own and the evil of things ineffably larger than us. Incomprehensible evil, yes? It cannot fit inside my mind. I cannot find the space for it, so it finds its way out in my nightmares. I wake up screaming night after night. But I live alone far from any neighbor, so I doubt I am much bother to anyone. Hah.
We did the right thing, didn’t we? We acted rightly when the chips were down, to use the old cliche’ . . . didn’t we?
I wonder. I suppose all my life I will wonder.
In any event. Now you know for a fact. I EXIST. I am still sucking breath.
So if you are
still feeling raw about . . . all that. Well. You know where to find me.
Yrs,
Ebenezer
* * *
From “Little Heaven’s Prisoners” (as published in Esquire magazine, January 1970) by Chris Packer:
He was a devious worm.”
Sister Muriel Hanratty remembers Amos Flesher all too well. His birdlike eyes. His fleshy lower lip. The pale strip of flab that ballooned between his waistband and the bottom of his shirts, which were always a size too small.
His nasty habits.
“He was a fiddler,” she tells me in the atrium of the Wooded Nook Rest Home outside of San Francisco. “Not a violinist,” she clarifies archly. “He touched himself. All the boys did, of course. No stopping that. You could cut their dirty sticks off and they’d still play with them, surely to Christmas. But there’s your garden-variety pawing and then there’s fiddling. It’s a wonder he didn’t whittle the thing away like a bar of soap in the shower, that’s how much he twiddled with it.”
At eighty-seven years old, Sister Muriel isn’t one for niceties. But I have little doubt that she was always a straight shooter. She worked at the San Francisco Catholic Orphanage for fifty years, until its doors shut for good. Budget cuts, Muriel says. A few of the other nuns were moved to Wooded Nook with her, but they have since passed on. She misses them, she says, as well as her time at the orphanage.
But not Amos Flesher. Him she does not miss one bit.
“He poked kids until they bled,” she tells me. “We had a ward full of boys and girls who were soft-headed. Our Children of God. The purest, most open smiles. We put Amos in charge of them during naptime. Amos was old enough; he ought to sing for his supper, we figured. Well, he stuck those poor kids. With a darning needle or a big pin. Most of them were restrained; it’s terrible, but it was for their own good. I started to see blood on their jammies. Their bums, their thighs. First I thought it was bedbugs. But it went on a while. I never caught him doing it. Amos was a sly boy. I don’t know that I’d call him smart—cunning is the word I’d use. Why would he want to hurt those poor children?” She shook her head. “When I heard about what happened out in the woods, I thought: Amos Flesher went and got himself a whole camp full of soft-brains so he could stick them all with pins. He was bloody-minded, Amos Flesher was. Bloody as anyone I’ve known.”
Bloody-minded. It would seem so. In the three years that have passed since the Little Heaven fire (it is properly known as the Black Lands fire, but hardly anyone refers to it by that name), precious little is known about the circumstances preceding it. No adult from Little Heaven lived to tell the tale, including Amos Flesher himself; the children who survived can recall very little of their experience. By the time I was able to arrange interviews with some of them—navigating a web of protective caretakers and foster parents and aunts and uncles—their stories held little in common. It would seem that their minds have embarked on a purposeful act of erasure. They can remember almost nothing, which is likely for the best.
About all that links their stories is a thread of stark, almost unimaginable terror. They talk about seeing their parents covered in blood—flashbulb memories, these searing mental images—though they can no longer recall how that happened. They’ve surrendered the connective tissue between these vivid recollections, the necessary bridgework. One girl talked about “a dark place where a dead baby wouldn’t stop crying.” Noises in the woods. A ghostly giant with the black eyes of a doll. The stuff of childhood nightmares, all of it. The kids’ minds and memories seem to be playing tricks on them, putting the faces of imaginary boogeymen on horrors too real to cope with—the evil of men. The evil of their own mothers and fathers, just maybe.
Survivor trauma, the shrinks call it.
Fire is the grand reducer. The heat of a forest fire can reach 2,672 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to melt carbon steel. Little Heaven disappeared in the most conclusive way: it burned, carbonized, and drifted away on the wind. Every structure, every body, everything. Gone. There is no way to sift the leavings and make much sense of what happened there. Only questions remain. Were they all dead already when the fire swept over the hillside? If so, how? If not, why didn’t they flee when the fire began to burn down upon them? They would have had time to abandon everything and run. They might have even made it out at a brisk walk, had they seen the fire early enough.
But that didn’t happen. Every adult died—or if not, they are nowhere to be found. They have not resurfaced anywhere and have yet to reclaim their children. The only sane reasoning is that they are gone. The hows and whys may never be known.
“I hope he’s burning in hell,” Sister Muriel says when I ask after the fate of Reverend Amos Flesher. She has a highly developed sense of divine retribution, and she lets it be known that God would not have it any other way. “Sure as I have breath in my body, that boy is roasting in the fiery pit. I hope the Devil gives him a few extra pokes with his pitchfork for me. Evil little bastard. The dirty fiddler.”
* * *
Letter postmarked June 8, 1969. Girdler, Kentucky:
Dear Slimeball
So. I guess I’m glad you’re not dead. Congratulations on living.
Minny
2
MICAH FOUND ELLEN AGAIN, just as he said he would. And she was sure he’d come, though it took longer than she would have liked. She had made him a new eye by then, which was good, because he showed up wearing that ratty old patch.
“You’d go to pieces without me” was the first thing she said to him.
It became a familiar refrain. You’d go to pieces. In time, it proved to be true. A man can go his whole life never needing anyone. But when he finally finds the one, he can’t live without her.
Ellen had been living with Nate in the town nearest her sister’s jail. By then, Ellen had put it all out in the open to her nephew. Ellen was his aunt. She had been sent by Nate’s mother to check in on Nate at Little Heaven. Ellen had hired Micah and the other two.
Nate took it all pretty well. Kids didn’t suffer so much with cognitive dissonance. He missed his father, despite how badly Reggie had unraveled in his final days. It wasn’t his fault, Nate reasoned privately to himself. It was a lot to ask, and more than his father had been fit to bear. Nate wished his last memories of his father weren’t so negative. He wished he hadn’t seen his body on the grass in front of the chapel, his forehead . . . He wished he hadn’t seen that, but he knew, having seen it, that he always would.
He went back to school. His teachers remarked on what a pleasant, thoughtful boy Nate was—though they might have said in the privacy of the teacher’s lounge, over a quickly puffed cigarette, that he was more remote and somehow harder than a boy his age ought to be. As if Nate had suffered extreme pressures that had diamondized him. And those sparkling, diamond-like aspects of Nate were just a little off-putting. They made a person feel nervous, even when the boy gave you no good reason to feel that way in his presence.
Micah rented a room in the same town. Nobody there knew their histories.
At one point, a reporter came rolling in. Fussy guy with a Virginian accent, always wore a crisp vanilla-white suit. With one of the big-city dailies, he said. Had a hot tip that one or more of the survivors of the Little Heaven fire might be living right here. Well, that put a bug up the town’s collective ass. But Micah was glad that the reporter wasn’t much good at his job, and that he went away empty-handed to pursue some story about astronauts.
The three of them spent every waking minute together. Before long Ellen’s sister earned an early parole, time served for good behavior. Ellen helped her get reacquainted with life outside the walls. Then Nate moved back in with his mother. After that, it was time to go. Ellen had a new life to get on with. One that now included Micah.
For Micah’s part, he left it all behind. The gun-for-hire work. He had no other skills, but he was willing to learn. They got married in a small chapel in Santa Cruz. They bought a ranch and settled down. Mica
h wasn’t much of a herdsman or a farmer, but still, things had a way of working out. Money flowed to him, easy as water. Some said he had the devil’s own luck. If they only knew.
They were never far from the black rock. At first, they saw themselves as guardians of a sort. Sentinels. It was only a matter of hours to reach it, though neither of them had the smallest desire to make that journey. That place lived deep inside their minds, implacable as a pebble in their shoes. In time, though, they forgot about the rock—their conscious minds did, anyway. But it twisted away in their under-brains, as such things are wont to.
They had a child. Their greatest joy. Micah wept the day Petty was born. When she got sick as an infant, he sat up all night beside her crib, rocking her when she cried. And if, as she got older, Petty sensed a distance from her father, well, he was distant with everybody except her mother. He was not cold or unloving with Pet, and he was wildly protective of her—just, he seemed unable to open himself to her completely, as other fathers might. He carried an inarticulate sorrow that a man of few words was incapable of expressing.
Then one morning Micah’s wife, Petty’s mother, didn’t wake up.
Micah rose that morning to find her still sleeping. He got up to make breakfast. He found it strange that she would be asleep, as she was usually up before him. When he came back, she had not woken. He laughed under his breath—he was not a man for laughter, but Ellen could provoke it in him for almost no reason at all—and ate his breakfast alone. Petty woke and dressed and ate and went outside to play. Micah watched her run through the field, the crisp morning light falling through her spread fingers.
He went into the bedroom. Ellen was still sleeping. Her chest rose and fell; her eyeballs zipped around under her lids. There was something profound about her sleep. A seam of worry split Micah’s mind. He gripped her shoulder gently.