Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  “I’m sorry,” she said, though she could not say for whom this apology was meant.

  They entered the thicker tree line at the edge of the perimeter. They felt it sucking at their spines—the grieving, implacable tug of Little Heaven, its grim memories, its souls interred beneath the sunbaked dirt—until that tension released, freeing them with almost an audible sigh.

  “How do we know the world isn’t full of such things?” said Ebenezer later.

  “What things?” said Minerva.

  Ebenezer stared up at the sky, pricked with guttering stars. “A man descends into madness, a family goes missing, a backwoods religious compound burns to ashes—how do we know that the cause is earthly? Known? Often we never find out. But we tell ourselves it must be so because to invite other possibilities is to invite madness into our hearts, isn’t it?”

  They walked for quite some time in silence, pondering this. Ebenezer had exhausted his capacity for speech. He dragged his leg behind him like a curse.

  “There’s one thing I’ve always wondered, Shug,” Minerva said.

  Micah made a questioning grunt.

  “When we were all there in the rock, you menacing it with the knife like you were going to hack it to pieces,” Minerva said. “This is weird to say, it being so small and weak-looking and all, but . . . did you get the impression it was all that scared, really?”

  This had occurred to Micah as well. At the time, he had believed it was frightened, the way it flinched and mewled. But over the years, he had come to wonder if it had merely been pretending. How could anything like that have any fear of man? Perhaps it had been an act. One facet of the grand game it had played with them all.

  “I cannot say.”

  “Because it’s not weak, is it?” said Minerva. “Not at all. Christ, it won’t let me die. I can’t even . . . It won’t even let God take me. Or the devil.”

  “I have a theory about that,” Ebenezer said. “What if its power over you is directly influenced by how close you draw to it? Picture a nuclear reactor with a leak. If you’re ten thousand miles away, you’ll feel nothing. If you’re right next to it—if you stick your hand into it—then you’re dead. The closer you get, the more power it has over you. You carry that sickness the rest of your life, okay. But in order for you to truly be at its mercy, you’d have to enter the black rock.”

  Minerva nodded, accepting this. “Why did it grant us those wishes, then—because it knew they would cause us more pain than not granting them?”

  Neither Micah nor Ebenezer answered her. The truth seemed all too plain.

  They hiked until the trees thinned out. The creatures that had plagued them all those years ago—the ones that had torn off Terry Redhill’s head and Ebenezer’s ear, that had ended Otis Langtree’s and Charlie Fairweather’s lives—were not in evidence. They had no use under present circumstances: Micah and the others were making their way to their master’s lair willingly, if not eagerly.

  Dawn began to gloss the horizon. They staggered, their legs failing—and then, quite suddenly, they were there.

  The gray sand and paling sky. The black rock.

  “Dypaloh,” Micah said. “There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands.”

  Ebenezer and Minerva looked at him, confused.

  “Read that somewhere,” he said. “Exact opposite of this.”

  They rounded the face of the rock where it sheared on a ninety-degree scaling. It was the same as ever—towering, featureless, obsidian. There were no crags or outcroppings where birds might build nests, but then, it would seem an unwise choice for any living thing to dwell upon it. The rock was cold, though the day itself was heating up; a chill radiated off it, as if the coils of a refrigerator were humming behind a quarter inch of stone. The polished surface reflected their features with a funhouse-mirror warp: they somehow looked younger in that shadowy reflection, as if their old selves were trapped in there, too. In many ways, that was true, as a part of them had never left this place.

  They hiked around the sheer obsidian angles, and in time they reached the cleft. Though it was now daytime, the sun was blanketed by thick gray clouds. But even if the sun had been shining at full wattage, its light would not have penetrated far inside the rock.

  Micah unpacked the last of his gear. He lit the kerosene lantern and tested his flashlight. He patted his pocket to make sure his Buck knife was still there. He shouldered his backpack again. Minerva noticed him wince under its weight.

  “You can stay out here,” he said to them.

  “Shut up,” Minerva said. “You know we damn well can’t, so quit saying it.”

  “We can’t?” Eb said.

  “You can,” said Minerva.

  Eb seemed to consider taking her up on the offer, but ultimately he shook his head.

  “In for a penny,” he said, squinting up at the sky.

  THAT OLD SMELL—the smell of living decay—hit their noses the moment they entered the cavern. Darkness swiftly closed over them. The lantern threw wavering shadows on the smooth, dripping rock walls. Their footsteps made no sound: they could have been stepping across an enormous wet sponge. They were filled with terror—as stark as the silvery flash of minnows in a dark pool—but they had no choice. They had surrendered that choice years ago.

  “Olms,” Micah said at one point.

  He held the lantern above his head; its light fled up to a domed ceiling bubbled within the rock. “There were olms up there last time.”

  “The hell are those?” said Minny.

  “Salamanders of a sort,” he said. “Thousands of them. White ones.”

  Minny said, “Well, ain’t it a crying shame they’re gone.”

  Micah managed a smile. If this had an endgame feeling to it—and yes, it surely did—then why not have a few laughs before the curtain came down?

  They reached the ledge. The darkness yawned. The rope ladder was still there, rolled up right where Micah had left it. The strangest thing. He remembered watching Ellen climb it fifteen years ago, the backs of her legs trembling in exertion. He recognized that some part of her must still be here, too.

  Micah kicked the ladder over the edge; its rungs clattered against the stone as it unfurled. They climbed down. Ebenezer stopped halfway, his knuckles white on the rope, breathing in short doglike pants.

  “I’m okay,” he said, to himself more than to the other two. “I’m not, actually, but that’s okay. That’s perfectly acceptable.”

  They clustered in the basin facing the tunnel mouth. A sound emanated from it: a languorous exhale, as if the rock itself were breathing. Their faces were pale and sweat-stung in the lantern’s light.

  Micah unshouldered his pack and put it on backward so that it hung from his chest. He crawled in first, holding the lantern. The tunnel was peppered with other holes, both small and large, holding teeming knots of darkness. Not a goddamned thing had changed. It was like crawling through an old dream that got progressively worse, narrowing to a perfect speck of darkness—the center of the nightmare.

  The kids, Micah thought. We saved them. They would still be down here otherwise. That is the only change—they are not here. That is a good difference.

  Ooooh, but wait, whispered a silky, devious voice in his ear. Some of them are still here, aren’t they?

  The tunnel ended. One by one, they crawled out and stood within the great, dark vault. Micah set the lantern down and shrugged off his pack. He found his flashlight and swept it through the inky—

  “No” was all he heard Minny say. One word, flatly stated. Her voice full of horror.

  3

  FIFTEEN YEARS. One-fifth of the average human lifespan, give or take. Yet time tended to behave oddly; it was never static, and people felt it differently depending on circumstance. For a child squirming in his desk on the last day of school, those final minut
es before the bell rang could seem endless. When that same boy passed through adulthood to old age, those same minutes could pass without his knowing.

  Fifteen years. For the Reverend Amos Flesher, they must have been an eternity.

  He hung in a web of scintillating red ropes. His body had shrunken and seized up; his feet, which had once touched the ground, now dangled nearly a foot above it. His skin was as brown and dry and moistureless as a chunk of liver forgotten in the back of a freezer. He looked somehow wooden. His toes were curled and hooked upward in grisly curlicues, like awful genie shoes. His lips had thinned away to transparencies, his teeth brown and cracked. The fretwork of ropes creaked softly like the hull of an old Spanish galleon on the night sea.

  Micah swept the flashlight past this horrible sight, moving left . . . His breath caught.

  “Pet.”

  His daughter stood behind the Reverend. Motionless, her face crawling with dread. Micah stepped toward her. The flashlight disclosed another shape behind her. Its fingers curled possessively on Petty’s shoulder, its upper body swathed in darkness.

  The Big Thing. The Flute Player.

  “Daddy, please.”

  Micah could not tell if it was his daughter who had spoken or the thing behind her—it was an uncanny mimic, as he recalled. He held up his hands in surrender.

  “She is all I want.”

  “Ass, gas, or grass,” the Big Thing said in his daughter’s voice. “Nobody rides for free, Daddy-o.”

  Micah nodded. Instinctively, he knew what to do. He pulled the knife from his pocket and unfolded the blade. He approached the Reverend. The slit in his back, the one Shughrue had carved into it all those years ago, was still wet, still . . . weeping. Gingerly, Micah touched the tip of the knife to its edge. A membrane burst, spilling noxious nectar down the Reverend’s flesh. The smell was that of a cracked-open coffin. Micah glanced at Amos’s face, wondering if any of this was registering; the Reverend’s eyelids were fissured with tiny dry cracks that seemed on the verge of ripping open, spilling his eyeballs down his cheeks.

  Micah turned his attention back to the slit. He drew the blade across it, severing the protective sac. Something turned inside the wound, fat and slug-like; the sight was reminiscent of a cat stretching itself on a warm windowsill.

  “Micah, what are you . . . ?” Minerva said somewhere behind him.

  The thing began to push itself out forcefully, with hard flexes and shoves. The Reverend shook helplessly; a second rip spread across his abdomen, and a desiccated loop burped through the split. His crotch—which was essentially sexless by now, just a flaccid free-hanging tube like a spent condom and a terribly distended and elongated sack with a pair of BBs rolling around inside—swayed lewdly, parodically. Micah stumbled back, the sight so overwhelming that his knees buckled, fear rushing through his brain as the thing muscled its way out with determined thrusts and the other thing, its helpmate, laughed the same way his daughter did at Scooby-Doo and Scrappy on the Saturday morning cartoons—

  The thing slid out of the Reverend’s back and landed on the floor. At nearly the same instant, the ropes mooring the Reverend let go. The Reverend fell gracelessly and crumpled to the floor in a boneless heap . . .

  Then Amos Flesher began to shriek.

  His screams drilled through the air and ricocheted off the walls. They started out hoarsely, his vocal cords seized from disuse, but built to a lung-rupturing pitch. They were the gibbering bleats of a lunatic—a madness so profound it was all but unimaginable.

  “No, Daddy!” he squealed as he bucked and writhed on the stone. “You don’t love me anymore you don’t love me never stop loving meeeeeee!”

  Micah was overcome with pity. Amos Flesher was a devil—the cruelest man he had ever encountered, and he had run across many in his lifetime—but to see him there, naked and wizened as he shuddered on the floor with a kind of horrid, lascivious glee . . . Micah wanted to do something, if only to shut him up and end his misery. But he could not. He was completely paralyzed.

  The Reverend’s hands—brown and sinewy and hooked into talons—danced in the air. His legs moved as if he was trying to climb an invisible staircase. He began to rip at his wasted body. His skin tore all too easily. Chunks of his chest and arms ripped free like enormous scabs. He screamed and laughed until he ran out of breath and began to gag helplessly as his hands rose to his face, scrabbling at his cheeks and nose and finally his eyes, which burst dryly, like spore bags, releasing splintered puffs of matter.

  “Daddy!” he mewled, crawling blindly toward the thing that had lived inside of him for fifteen years, feeding on him in some terrible way, wrecking him in a manner no human should have to experience. “Pleeeeeaase, oh pleeeease, don’t leeeeave me, Daddy!”

  He scrabbled toward the wet pink baby-thing, moaning and spluttering. The Big Thing left Petty’s side; it strode forward, and with quick, methodical ease, it stepped on the Reverend Amos Flesher’s skull. A sickening crunch. The Reverend’s reedlike legs jittered. Then they quit moving.

  Micah waited, his breath whinnying out of him. When the Big Thing did not move, he took a wide berth around the squirming baby-thing and went to his daughter. The Big Thing knelt, fingering the remains of Flesher’s broken skull case. The Reverend’s brain was pale and dry, leeched of moisture, like some kind of cheap, crumbled cheese.

  Micah knelt in front of Petty, inspected her for injuries. “Did it hurt you?”

  She shook her head. She seemed both alert and hazy at once, as though trapped in a very vivid dream she was helpless to wake from.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Are you here?” she said. “Really here?”

  “You are not dreaming, Pet. I am here.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Me too. More than you can imagine.”

  “It said you owed its daddy. What do you owe, Dad?”

  Everything, Pet. Everything I can possibly give.

  Micah turned to the things, the father and its doting son. “I know what you want. But you have to let them all go.”

  The Big Thing squatted beside the baby. For some time, they held a silent palaver.

  “What if we want . . . everything?” the Big Thing finally said.

  “You do not want them,” Micah said evenly. “You never did.”

  The two things conferred further. The Big Thing appeared to chuckle.

  “Yes,” it said. “Just one of you will do.”

  “And you must lift the curse. Take it back.”

  A smile touched the corners of the Big Thing’s mouth. “Curse? My father should be outraged. Was it not exactly what you wished for?”

  Micah said nothing. In time, the Big Thing nodded. “As you wish. My father is merciful.”

  Micah turned to Ebenezer and Minerva. “Take her,” he said. “Quickly.”

  “Micah, no,” said Minerva. “What are you—?”

  Micah turned away. He couldn’t stand to look at them. He had known from the outset that it would come to this. He had realized—in the deepest, most honest chamber of his heart—that it would have to end like this. It was the only way. The creature would take all of them, or it would take Micah alone. But Micah had to give himself willingly. And he knew the thing wanted him so, so badly. For he was surely the only member of his species who had ever caused it true fear, true pain, in its vast and fearsome life.

  Micah turned back to confront his daughter’s agonized face. He hugged Pet tightly. With her arms pinned to her sides, she was too surprised to return it. He felt the heat of her body and the rapid beat of her heart. He tried to imprint it in his mind: her warmth, her innocence, all the love pouring out of him into her.

  “I love you, Pet.” She shimmered before him. “I love you so much. And your mother, of course. More than anything on earth. You be sure to tell her that, okay? You tell her how much I love you both. Will you do that?”

  His daughter nodded obediently. He wondered if she had any idea of just how much he lov
ed her. Does a child ever understand the irrational, endless love of a parent?

  “Go, then,” he said. “And do not ever come back. Do you hear me?”

  “No, Daddy. I won’t go without you.”

  “It cannot be any other way, my love. You do not understand, but you have to trust me. I am begging you.”

  Minerva and Ebenezer stood in the sputtering light of the lantern. Micah appealed to them next. “Go. Now. What in hell’s name are you waiting for?”

  “We can’t just—” Minerva started.

  Micah stilled her with a look. She knew, too. As did Ebenezer. This was the only possible way. The cards were stacked against them. Those cards had begun to stack the moment Micah had accepted Ellen Bellhaven’s request to take her to Little Heaven to find her missing nephew.

  Micah tried to let go of his daughter. His arms wouldn’t unlock. He wanted to hold her forever. But he had to let go.

  His arms wrapped around her, the comfort he felt with her in his hands—his hands. He saw them now in the flickering lantern light. Hard, callused. A killer’s hands. At first, he hadn’t wanted to hold Petty when she was an infant. This memory came to him, clear as spring water. He had been afraid that some of his evilness might invade her tiny body. But he sensed a change in himself the moment she was born, right in his very atoms. His arms, his hands, his entire body was changing in subtle ways in order to accept this sweet burden he’d been given. She fits perfectly in my hands, he remembered thinking when the doctor gave her to him. They have shaped themselves to her without my even knowing—

  He let his daughter go. It was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. “Go, my Pet.”

  “No!” the girl screamed, clutching at him.

  The Big Thing chuckled, enjoying the touching family moment.

  “We can accommodate two,” it said.

  “You will have to take her,” Micah pleaded with Ebenezer and Minny. “Please.”

  They grabbed his daughter’s arms. Her screams intensified as they dragged her away, legs kicking wildly. Ebenezer whispered something into her ear. At that, Petty stopped kicking. Her eyes shone in the dim, the brightest spots in the chamber.