Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  “Ellen?” He shook her. “Ellen?”

  Her eyes opened then. Relief washed through Micah. But it soon faded. Ellen’s eyes were open, yes, but her chest rose and fell with the rhythm of sleep. Her body was warm and vibrating like a tuning fork that had been struck moments ago.

  Their long waking nightmare began that day. Ellen’s eyes would remain open, often for days at a time—but she would not wake up. The doctor tried the standard techniques: loud noises, pinching the flesh between her thumb and forefinger. Nothing. A coma, or something like it. Locked-in syndrome: Micah heard the doctor speak this phrase over the phone. The doctor asked questions: Had they been out of the country recently? Had she been bitten by anything? Suffered a bad fall? Eaten some foreign delicacy for the first time? No, no, no, no, no.

  Specialists came next. Sleep-disorder doctors and nerve-disorder doctors and doctors who administered to maladies Micah had never conceived. All useless. Ellen slept with her eyes wide open. She got thinner and thinner. The doctors plugged feeding tubes into her. She developed bedsores; they swelled and burst. Micah dressed them and turned her over often to prevent them from festering. As she rarely blinked, Ellen’s eyes would get as dry and tacky as peeled grapes. Micah had a specialist create moisturized eyeball shields made out of breathable fabric; he would put them over Ellen’s eyes and keep them wet with a special solution squeezed from an eyedropper.

  Ellen’s sister and Nate moved to the nearest town. There wasn’t much they could do. They sat by Ellen’s bed and talked to her. They read books out loud; Nate would record himself reading books on cassettes, which Micah would play on the tape player in her room. The doctors said that might work; they said that Ellen might follow a familiar voice up out of the fog.

  He slept beside her at night. Sometimes she turned to him, one of the moisture pads slipping off the convex of her eyes. Staring at him in the moonlight bleeding through the curtains—the light’s on, but nobody’s home. Or was somebody home? Was Ellen behind those eyes, trapped inside her own skull, screaming to be let out? She did not make a noise on those nights—except sometimes, in a whisper so hushed he could barely make it out, she would say: “Please, no. Please stop.” Those words iced his heart. What was happening inside her head? What horrors was she living through? He whispered to her: “Please wake up.” But he knew, in a complex chamber of his heart, that she would not—because of him. He had wished this upon her.

  My dearest love will never leave me.

  Had that been it? His wish? It must have been something like that, if not those words exactly—it hadn’t been anything expressible in words, anyway, and the creature hadn’t needed him to say it. It had simply reached into his heart and plucked it out.

  You’d go to pieces . . . Never leave me.

  And the creature had delivered, hadn’t it? Oh yes, in full. He wanted Ellen to be with him forever, never leaving his side. That had been his cowardly, heartsick wish. And so he’d gotten it. Lock, stock, and barrel.

  “I am so sorry,” he whispered into her ear. “I never wanted this.”

  And yet he had done it. His wish had put her there in that bed, beyond all remedy.

  He thought about it. Going to the black rock. Asking that thing for Ellen’s release. But he had his daughter to consider, and he sensed it didn’t work that way. He had to wait. Suffer, as Ebenezer and Minerva were surely suffering. That was part of it. Perhaps the most crucial part. The suffering.

  So they lived there—a man and his daughter and the woman they both loved—on the edge of some greater catastrophe that never quite arrived. But Micah understood that someday it would come to drag him back into the fray.

  And then, one lonely night when the stars shone especially bright, the black thing’s henchman had come and taken his daughter.

  Which is when it began all over again—because such things never truly ended, did they? The wheel went around and around. You rode along and it changed you. You didn’t change the wheel. It kept turning and turning until it was time to take that final spin.

  3

  FIRE IS THE GREAT PURIFIER.

  The woods came back. The flames died down and the ashes nourished new life. It was not long before green shoots were pushing through a crackling layer of slag.

  The shoots became trees and shrubs; the forest thrived as it had before. The woods climbed the hillsides and filled out the valleys in crisp chlorophyll green. Long alleys of undergrowth cast sprawling shadows so dense that it was chilly in their shade on even the warmest summer days. Wildflowers scattered knolls between sweeping boughs of oak and cottonwood; foxgloves and bracken shone redly in the broad sunshine. Deep thickets and spongy undergrowth sprang up; bramble and buckthorn and tangled knots of poison oak lay over the ground in heavy abundance, dank and choking.

  The animals returned in time. The woods teemed with the smallest forms of life at first. The industry of ants, the scuttling of beetles. Then the chirp of birds and the scamper of rodents. Soon the animals that made a meal of those lower orders of life returned, too—the foxes and opossums and lynxes and wolves. Everything grew and spread and became whole again. The shadows stretched, and in them, life went on as it always had.

  The black rock was there, too. It had been there forever.

  No living creature approached its sheer cliffs. The animals and even the insects steered clear—something warned them off. Nothing grew upon the rock, or even near it. In the deepest hour of night, a sound could sometimes be heard emanating from it. A prolonged sigh. Was it of contentment, or of unspeakable pain? Impossible to tell.

  The black rock stood within itself, brooding and implacable.

  It waited as it always had. For that wheel to come round again.

  1

  YOUR DADDY OWES MY DADDY.

  The Long Walker traveled on. Petty followed helplessly, her hand engulfed in its own. The woods are lovely, dark and deep—that was a line from a poem her mother read to her years ago, before slipping into her big sleep.

  The trees creaked in a gentle breeze that ruffled the hem of Petty’s nightgown. She wasn’t cold or hungry or thirsty, though she should be all of those things by now. Here and there the boughs dropped away to give a view of the sky salted with bright stars.

  Your daddy owes my daddy . . .

  The Long Walker had told her this at the start of their journey. What had her father done, and to whom? Her dad was a strong and clever man, but she doubted he would double-cross anyone, especially anything that might count the Long Walker as its son.

  The Long Walker spidered up the side of a cliff, its feet finding hidden grooves in the rock. It cradled Petty lovingly; with her ear pressed to its chest, she could hear the strange workings of its insides: a cresting buzz, as if its chest was all honeycombs crawling with wasps.

  The trees grew sickly and sparse. A huge formation came into view: darker than the night sky, with a density that made her body shrink inside her skin. Was the Long Walker taking her there? She couldn’t even imagine it.

  I will go crazy, she thought simply.

  She knew that wasn’t how it happened. People didn’t “go crazy,” not all at once. It was something that occurred more slowly. A person starts to hear voices, or she thinks people are looking at her when really they’re not. Those worries get worse, and that person slowly slips into insanity. But Petty could see it happening another way, too. A person experiences something so horrible that it tears her brain in half—a crack zigzagging across a frozen river, the black madness pouring in all at once.

  The trees gave way to a sandy slope leading to the monolithic rock. She tried to jerk her hand out of the Long Walker’s grip. It laughed softly at her struggles.

  “Please,” she said. “I don’t want to go.”

  “One two three four five six seven,” it said in a voice Pet recognized as her own mother’s. “All good children go to heaven.”

  “Don’t.” Her cheeks flushed with anger despite her fear. “Don’t you talk like h
er, you . . . you asshole,” she said, summoning the vilest word she knew.

  The Long Walker grinned, perhaps admiring her spunk. The towering shadow of the rock cast over them even in the dead of night. Coldness seeped off of it, and a faraway sense of panic wormed into her veins.

  “Have you ever heard a newborn cry as it awakes from a nightmare?” the Long Walker asked. Petty was too stunned by its question to reply.

  “A newborn, only a few days old,” it went on. “They have nightmares, but not as you would understand. Their minds are unformed, as was your own at that age. A newborn baby can still see the world behind the world, you see? The world where my daddy lives, and me and a few others like us. They can still see us. That’s why they scream as they do.”

  Petty swallowed hard. “Because they’re . . . they’re scared of you?”

  “No, precious. Because they don’t want us to leave them.”

  They reached a cleft in the rock. The Long Walker guided her inside. It had to stoop to make its way through the dark and twisting cavern. They went deeper and deeper, until the light died. The Long Walker was untroubled by the darkness, though—it navigated as if by some kind of sonar, never stumbling, bearing Petty quickly along. There came a faint squishing from overhead, but that quickly dwindled. The mineral smell of the rock invaded Petty’s nostrils. She stepped on something that made a metallic rattle under her feet. She caught a glimpse of a child’s toy browned with rust.

  They came to a drop. A rope ladder was rolled up at the ledge, its rungs salted with dust that had accumulated over a period of years. The Long Walker sat, its legs dangling over the edge. It had no need of the ladder; it skinned down the rocks, carrying Petty effortlessly. At the bottom was another tunnel. The Long Walker urged her inside of it—Petty had stopped fighting, realizing it was useless to try. It swept in behind her, its body filling the entire tunnel. She couldn’t see a thing, yet she never bumped a wall or hit a dead end. She might as well have been moving through outer space.

  They crawled for some time. Petty didn’t even think she was crawling—she was motionless, her limbs made sluggish with worry, and yet she moved. The Long Walker propelled her forward through some manner of infernal mechanics; she felt as if she were on a moving walkway, or had been harnessed to a remorseless winch that was pulling her toward . . . likely nothing she’d ever want to meet.

  The tunnel emptied into what her senses told her was an enormous vault—the air wasn’t as tight, and she got an impression of vastness, as if she’d stepped into a warehouse. But she still couldn’t see anything. That was frightening enough. It was like waking in the middle of the night in your bed and waiting for your eyes to adjust. But at least then you’re still in your warm bed, in your house, with your parents not far away. Here she was totally alone . . .

  No. There was something else in here.

  That’s what was raising the hackles on her neck, what was making the flesh crawl up her throat.

  “I’m home, Daddy.” The Long Walker danced, limbs swinging and kicking. “Home again, home again, jiggety jig.”

  It pranced into the center of the space toward whatever it was that inspired fright to flutter like a bird’s wings in Petty’s chest. Its body kicked off a weird deep-sea glow . . . and that’s where Petty may as well have been right now: a hundred miles under the surface of the deepest sea, hopelessly alone.

  The light of its body touched the shape of another shape. Petty staggered back with a scream rising in her throat.

  I will go crazy in a second was the thought that rabbited through her mind. And maybe that’s for the best.

  2

  MICAH, MINERVA, AND EBENEZER set off from the godforsaken cabin before daybreak. Minerva was plagued by worries that its luckless occupant might peel himself from his perch upon the wall and shamble forth, blood spluttering from the severed stump of his neck, to avenge the loss of his head—which was by then a roasted, hatchet-cleaved husk in the stove.

  They had debated burying the poor man’s remains, but that was a problematical proposition, owing to the fact that his body, while indeed headless, was still moving: the legs quivering, the arms spasming against the heavy pelt tacks pierced through his flesh. Even trying to bury a motionless body would tax both their energy and sanity, which was already somewhat on the trembling edge—as such, they regretfully opted to leave him hanging on the wall.

  Having made their decision, they hunkered down a couple hundred yards from the cabin. But the proximity was too much for Minerva: she kept hearing the choking, garbled laughter of the hunter’s decapitated head as it baked in the stove; she swore that she could overhear his spiteful chuckles spindling up through the tin chimney and atomizing into the air like so much lunacy-inducing smoke.

  “Let’s go,” she said to them before dawn had even broken.

  They walked, resolutely. Their bodies ached, joints screaming. They were fifteen years older than they’d been the last time they made this trek. The land was unchanged, but they were different. Gray hair, wrinkles, shot nerves. Ebenezer’s knee felt as though it had been hollowed out and packed full of fire ants. As the hills grew steeper, Minerva regretted every belt of gutrot whiskey she’d drunk and every unfiltered cigarette she’d smoked in the interceding years. The fear was what wearied them the most—fear had a terrible way of getting inside your chest, sucking at you like a vampire until every step became a misery.

  But the nearer they came to the black rock, the more their pains receded. Exhaustion and thirst and hunger deserted them. Their pace actually picked up. Micah had heard that people who perished of hypothermia felt the same way: their brains kicked out a powerful natural narcotic that caused a rosy glow to settle over their minds as their organs froze inside of them.

  They spoke as they walked. The darkness unlocked their lips—they spoke, if only to drive that blackness away. They raised questions of an unanswerable nature that had dogged them the last fifteen years.

  “What do you think it is?” Minerva asked. “I’ve always wondered. A demon?”

  “Mammon,” said Ebenezer. “Demon of greed. A minor demon, but even a minor one is cause for alarm, right?” A wan laugh. “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. Scripture of Matthew. I saw an old painting in a book. This hunched, goblinny thing. For a while I’d thought . . .”

  They followed the shadowed path. Creatures stirred faintly in the underbrush.

  “But I don’t think so now,” Eb went on. “If I believed it was a demon, then I would have to believe in its opposite, in God, the pantheon of angels and all the rest. And despite the fact that I see His face every night—or what that thing will have me believe is His face—I do not trust in God’s existence.”

  “What about the other thing?” said Minerva. “Ole daddy longlegs that you lit up like a Roman candle?”

  Ebenezer shrugged. “A familiar? Same as a black cat to a witch? What I want to know is why it doesn’t leave. Think about it. What it did to all the animals in these woods—what it turned them into. What it must have done to the minds of Amos Flesher and just about everyone else at Little Heaven. It is an immensely powerful entity, is it not?”

  Neither Minerva nor Micah would dispute it.

  “So why does it live in that rock?” Eb went on. “Why feed—is that what it does? Feed? Let’s assume so. Why not set up shop someplace where the pickings are more plentiful?”

  Micah had thought about this, too. Perhaps the thing was not so insatiable as Ebenezer suspected. Perhaps it was like a snake. It ate plentifully, dining on the sweetest flesh: on children, as it seemed to have more of an appetite for them than the older, stringier members of our species. Though perhaps it wasn’t about the quality of our meat, lamb versus mutton—it was the quality of a child’s spirit, its virginal state, versus the corrupted and corroded worldview of an adult. Once it had eaten, it had no need to seek
prey again for possibly decades—so long as it had a host like Augustus Preston or Amos Flesher, something to suck on slowly like an after-dinner mint. If it were to migrate to some more populated place, it might be found out. This thing had been plying its trade a long time, and this was its happy hunting ground.

  But there was another possibility—one that had dawned years ago, when Micah fleetingly touched those glowing ropes that had borne Augustus Preston aloft. He’d felt such warmth and wonderment in that instant. Those ropes felt . . . heavenly. So perhaps those ropes held both Preston and the thing in thrall . . . ?

  Maybe the black rock wasn’t the thing’s home. What if it was its prison?

  The trees bled away. They came to a spot where the foliage grew sparsely. A rough circle of blast. The vegetation was thinner, struggling to thrive. The leaves of the shrubs were a sick shade of off-white, eaten through with disease. They checked up, a signal pinging in their primal brains.

  “Little Heaven,” said Minerva. “We’re standing on its remains.”

  The diameter of the patch mimicked the size of the compound. Although there was no clear sign that Minerva was correct—they did not see the rusted ribs of the main gate poking up from the grayish dirt, or the flame-scoured remains of the massive crucifix that had once topped the chapel roof—they were each certain of it. Something emanated from the ground, seeping up like poisoned oil: the curdled, blighted miasma of Little Heaven. The fire-eaten bodies of its worshippers stirred in with the earth. Their ghostly voices drifting up, lamenting, searching for something—relief, perhaps even revenge. Against whom? Whom could they pin the blame on except themselves? Or had their souls ascended heavenward at the moment of their death, as Amos Flesher must have promised? Had they died in a state of grace?

  Micah and Ebenezer followed Minerva across the circle of barren ground. The wind scudded at their heels, raising cones of dust. Quite suddenly, Minerva had to tamp down the powerful urge to cry. She swiped her cheeks, certain her fingers would come away wet with tears. But they were dry as bone, dry as the cracked earth under her boots.