by Nick Cutter
Micah said, “It took her two nights ago, in the woods edging my home. I encountered one of the handmaids. But the other one, the more dangerous one . . .”
“The Flute Player.”
Micah nodded. “If you wish to call it that. It took my Pet.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard its song on the wind,” said Micah. “It wanted me to hear.”
“And it’s taking her back to . . . ?”
“Where else?”
Eb dropped his head again. His body appeared to deflate. His breath came heavy, as a man’s does just before he’s about to heave up his guts.
“Bloody fucking hell. I thought we ended all that,” he rasped. “It almost killed us all, and it certainly wrecked the three of us going forward, but . . . I thought we put that to bed for good and all.”
Micah did not fault the Englishman his belief. But was the thing they encountered in the woods ringing Little Heaven—the real terror, lurking within the black rock . . . Could such a thing truly be mastered by the hand of man? Or had they shackled it for only a brief while—years for them, for itself the mere blink of an eye—and given it time to heal, to plot, and to nurse its rage?
“I need your help,” Micah said quietly. “I would never ask, except . . .”
Ebenezer did not stir for quite some time. When at last he looked up, his eyes were still bloodshot, but there was only a slight quaver in his gaze. “I’ll need to pack some things.”
Ebenezer got up. He went into the bedroom. He shut the door and closed his eyes. He didn’t want Micah to see the way he slept. His bed was a single mattress on the floor. One sheet, no pillow. Micah didn’t need to see Ebenezer’s crucifix collection, either. Dozens of them. On every wall. Hung from the ceiling on loops of fishing line. Ebenezer himself had drawn crude crosses with charcoal pencils, scratching them onto the walls between the nailed-up crucifixes. Even though he did not believe in God—even though the god he saw when he closed his eyes was a leering idiot—the crosses comforted him in some odd fashion.
Ebenezer tried to sleep during the day; he found it easier to surrender consciousness with sunlight streaming into the room. But he was a hair-trigger sleeper; the sound of an ant pissing on cotton batting was enough to wake him up these days. He hadn’t slept—really slept—in fifteen years.
At night, he paced the house and stared out at the street, or surveyed the empty fields from his kitchen window. In the deepest hours of night he saw, or believed he could see, undefined shapes cavorting where the night was thinnest—just beyond the glow of the streetlights, or at the edges of the moonlight where it played over the barren grassland.
Things waiting. Things watching. Hungering.
Sometimes at night, Ebenezer slipped into a fitful doze. His system would just crap out like an old radiator. Then the dreams would come. Not just the one where he saw God’s face. That one was bad enough. This other dream was even worse.
In that dream he was trapped beneath the earth in a place where no light ever shone. He had been there before. In that darkness—so absolute he felt it attaching to his skin, pulling the blood out of his veins and the very sight out of his eyes—he could hear things. Terrible things. Sucking sounds. And other, subtler tones made worse by how delicate they were. That of flesh being pulled apart, maybe . . . which is not a very loud noise at all, though one might think it ought to be. Rending flesh carries its own note, which sounds like no other—a little like silk sheets slit apart with a scalpel.
In the dream, he stood in that clotted darkness, surrounded by the moist sucking, ripping, and the high breathless inhales a person makes when ice water is poured down the back of their necks. Taken together, they were almost sexual. The ecstatic, groveling noises of sexual climax.
Wending through these sounds, riding an alternate sonic register, was a note composed of many tiny voices threaded together . . .
. . . and it sounded like the laughter of children.
Ebenezer stood in his room surrounded by flea market crucifixes and began to shake, his body wracked with uncontrollable shivers. He hugged himself and bit his lip until blood squirted. His knees went out, and he collapsed to the floor silently, not wanting Micah to come in and see him this way. He laid his head on the floor.
You have no choice, he told himself. You have to go. Pull yourself together, for the love of Christendom.
He got the shakes under control. He stood, jelly-legged. He wiped away the blood. It was all right to be scared. Any man would be.
He pushed the mattress aside and prized up two floorboards. He pulled up a familiar beechwood box.
“Hello again, ladies.”
His Mauser pistols. A few loose bullets rolled around in the bottom of the box. The guns would need oiling, and he would need more ammunition. A great deal of it.
He dressed in faded jeans and a white V-neck T-shirt. He packed a bag with underwear, socks, shirts, and some trousers. The pistols went in the bag, too.
He took a crucifix off the wall. A four-inch Jesus with a tarnished copper face was nailed to the crossbeams.
“In you go, sport,” Ebenezer said, slipping it into his bag.
He stepped into the hall and shut the door behind him. Micah was still in the chair right where Ebenezer had left him.
Micah said, “You coming, then?”
“You think I got all dressed up just to stay here?”
“You probably will not come back, Eb. Neither you or me.”
Eb nodded. “It is probable.”
“Well. Thanks.”
“Oh well. I’ve lived long enough.”
They went outside. Ebenezer left the front door wide open.
“Need to say your good-byes to anybody before we go?” said Micah.
Ebenezer shook his head. “My creditors can seek redress with my next of kin, if they can be found. Now, how did you get here?”
“Took the bus.”
“Ah. I don’t have a car.”
“We can rent one.”
“Not in this town we can’t.”
They walked down the street. Micah walked slowly to allow his limping companion to keep stride. The sunshine imparted a pleasant tickle on their skin. The piebald dog resumed its pursuit.
“We could steal a car,” said Ebenezer. “That could be fun.”
“Either way.”
Eb sighed. “I imagine we’re off to find Minerva?”
“Yes.”
“Do you imagine she’s expecting us?”
“Were you expecting me?”
“Yes.”
“Then yes.”
Eb sighed again. “I don’t imagine she’ll be terrifically pleased to see us.”
“Pleased or not, we are coming.”
3
MINERVA FIGURED it was high time to try and hang herself again.
She couldn’t remember when or where the last time had been—the attempts all blended together after a while. Anyway, why not? She had no other plans for the afternoon.
Another town, another ratbag motel room. The Double Diamond Inn, this time. New Mexico was littered with shitholes just like it. The mattress was thirty years old and probably saturated with a thousand dreary cumshots milked from the nutsacks of basset-faced johns by one dead-eyed whore or another. And here Minny was, sitting on the mattress. Buoyed up on a cushion of grim, dried-up old sperm.
Minerva tended to get moody before a suicide attempt. It was tough to see the rosy side of life. But perhaps there had been happiness in this room, too. A young couple could have passed a night in this dump on their way to another city, a better life. Maybe their first child had been conceived in this very bed and had gone on to invent the floppy disk or star in an off-Broadway play or some shit. Who could say?
The noose was fashioned out of stout nautical rope. She had pulled a ceiling panel loose and knotted the rope around an exposed pipe. She sat on the bed, staring up at it.
She had a forty-ouncer of rye. Bathtub-grade shit, ju
st slightly more pure than Sterno. She would drink as much as she could, then clamber up on the chair and stuff her head through the noose. Kick the chair away, la-di-da, carefree as a bird. Say good night, Gracie.
But there was a chance—a perfectly good one—that she’d come to a few minutes later, her pants heavy after her bowels had involuntarily loosened and the whites of her eyes gone red with hemorrhaging. If so, she’d cut herself down and get on with her day.
She had drunk the neck out of the bottle when someone knocked on the door.
Shit. Fucking hellfire.
It wasn’t the cops. It never was. She had killed three men in a bar, two days and five hundred miles ago. Afterward, she had driven away. Nobody had pursued her. Nobody ever did.
It wasn’t the fact that the men she had killed in that bar were themselves killers and, as such, didn’t exactly inspire the police to discover who had ended their lives. When a mad dog kills another mad dog, the dogcatcher still pursues the murderous hound under the suspicion that it might kill an innocent creature next. And it was not that Minerva had left no trace. She had shot the men with witnesses present.
No, the cops did not give chase because that was part of the deal. She had made one discrete wish, but with it came all manner of consequence, unknown to her at the time. It wasn’t just that she had to live with the killing she’d done—it was the lack of comeuppance for having done it.
She had killed . . . Jesus, how many? Twenty? Twenty men over the past fifteen years. Twenty souls gone to heaven or hell or just vaporized, blown to some other part of the continuum on the cosmic winds. The people she had killed were bad in a basic sense, pollutants whose dismissal off the food chain was mourned by a precious few, but still. Nobody ever came sniffing after her. She went wherever she wanted and left whenever she desired. Her life was free of consequence or reprisal. She had spent not a single day in jail. She had been called in for questioning on occasion, spent a few hours in the stir, but inevitably a detective would tell her that she was free to go.
“What if I did it?” she’d asked one of them once.
“You didn’t do it,” the detective had said, as if reciting some boring middle-school fact, his face blank as a test pattern.
The knock came again. Insistently. Minerva set the bottle down. Her pistols lay on the bed. She reached for one.
“Who calls?” she said in a falsetto.
“It is Micah Shughrue, Minerva.”
A profound coldness invaded her chest. Minny gritted her teeth and waited for it to pass.
“You standing in front of the door?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why? You think I’d try to shoot you through it?”
Silence.
She put the gun down and got up. She opened the door a crack. Then she sat back on the bed. The door opened a few more inches. Micah slid his head through the gap.
“Do come in,” Minerva said primly. “Splendiferous beauty awaits you.”
His gaze made a quick circuit of the room; then he twigged on the noose.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“How did you find me?” she said, ignoring the question.
“Caught your scent on the wind.”
Micah didn’t need to explain. Although she hadn’t exactly known he was coming, Minerva wasn’t surprised. She always had a sense of where he’d been these past years—and the black sonofabitch, too, who had to be nearby. She never knew their precise coordinates, but all she had to do was close her eyes and concentrate. Little by little, their presence would start to ping. Seems they now each had the same ability, thanks to what had happened. All any of them needed to do was track those pings to their source.
“Hey!” she said. “You out there?”
“I am,” Ebenezer called out.
“You scared of me?”
“A smidge.”
Minerva sighed inwardly. When she considered the damage she had done over the last fifteen years to her fellow human beings—to those who deserved it, and some who had not quite been deserving—well, it would be disingenuous to say she and Ebenezer were not now peas from the same pod.
“Get your ass in here.”
Eb’s head poked around the door frame. He limped inside.
“Minny,” he said.
“Shithead,” she said flatly.
Ebenezer said, “Charmed, I’m sure.”
He, too, scoped the noose. His eyebrow ticked up. Minny swallowed more rye whiskey. What the fuck did she care what they thought?
“You boys made it in time for the show. Which one of you wants to kick the chair out from under me?”
The men hung their heads, unwilling to meet her eyes. Were they actually embarrassed for her? Well, screw them both. And the horses they rode in on.
“Okay, then. Get the fuck out of here if you’re not going to be useful.”
Micah turned his cold eye on her. A point of light sparked in the center of his remaining pupil. “You think I showed up to watch you hang yourself?”
“I don’t know why you showed up,” Minerva said sullenly. “You followed the wrong Bat Signal, Boy Wonders.”
Micah went into the bathroom. She heard him unwrap a plastic cup from its wax paper cover. Next, running water. When Micah came back, his glass eye was missing. He crossed to the dresser. A crumpled Burger King bag sat beside the portable TV. A few salt packets were scattered beside the bag.
“You need these?” Micah asked.
Minerva shook her head. Micah ripped the packets open and spilled salt into the water. He gave it a stir with his finger to dissolve the crystals.
He leaned forward until the rim of the cup encircled his empty socket. He tipped his head back, holding the cup in place. He shook his head and hissed as the salt water cured the flesh inside his empty socket. Then he brought his head down and took the cup away. Water dripped out of his socket onto the grimy motel shag. He dabbed away the excess water with a napkin.
He then pulled the glass eye from his duster pocket and dropped it into the cup. It sat in the bottom like an olive in a martini. He swirled it around, then fished it out and put it back in.
“Good?” he asked Minerva.
“A little bit to the . . .”
Micah adjusted the glass eye with his finger.
Minerva said, “Yeah, that’ll do.”
Micah sat on the bed beside her. Ebenezer watched from the doorway.
“I need your help.”
Minerva was surprised. Micah Shughrue wasn’t one to ask for anything. He was the sort of man who would track down the doctor who’d delivered him just to repay the debt.
He said, “I have a daughter.”
Minerva’s surprise deepened. “You have a daughter?”
“Isn’t life a cavalcade of wonderments?” Ebenezer said.
Micah said, “By Ellen.”
Ellen. The woman who’d dragged them into it. Dragged them straight to hell.
Minerva said, “So are you sore at me for not showing up to the baby shower?”
“It has taken her.”
The coldness Minerva had felt earlier intensified a hundredfold—layers of ice crystalizing inside the ventricles of her heart.
“Oh, Micah . . . are you sure? She didn’t run away? Young girls make a bad habit of that.”
“He encountered one of them in the woods,” Ebenezer said. “The handmaids. The ones stitched together out of scraps. But it was the other one who took his daughter.”
The other one, Minerva thought grimly. The Piper. The Son. Whatever you wanted to call it. How could Micah be so calm?
“It will not hurt her,” Micah said. “It is taking her back to act as . . .”
“Bait, right.” Minerva’s head nodded numbly, automatically. “Yeah. Makes sense. No way any one of us would go back willingly.”
Minerva dropped her head. She closed her eyes. The room tilted on its axis.
“And you need me, why?” she said. “What can I do? Any of us? I�
�m so sorry for your daughter. But we barely survived last time, and that was a long time ago. I’m a damn sight worse now than I was then.”
Micah said, “You look okay. Apart from the drink.”
“And the noose,” said Ebenezer.
She tried to smile. “I’m used up. And I’m . . . I’m scared, Shug.”
“Well. So am I.”
She looked up. Micah was placidly regarding her.
“You?”
He nodded. “Not so much for myself, but yes, I am scared.”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I honestly might not be any use to you.”
“Cry me a river,” Ebenezer said.
“What was that?” Minerva said icily.
“Are you the only one who harbors fear in your heart?” Eb mordantly chuckled. “I am as broken as ever I’ve been. My own shadow on the wall scares me most nights.”
“So go,” Minny said. “Who’s stopping you?”
Ebenezer shook his head. “I pegged you as many things, my dear. But never once did I peg you for a coward.”
Minerva cut her eyes at him. He met her gaze. A challenge. She dropped her head and waved a dismissive hand.
“Sell it walking.” She flipped a switch inside her mind, her eyes going hard. “Take your crazy somewhere else.”
Micah stood. Minerva thought he might try to press her, but that had never been his way. They would go without her. And die wretchedly in the dark. But they would go. Ebenezer might quit when the madness got too much—and it would, as sure as breathing—but Micah would wade right in until it stole everything he had to give.
“There a bar around here?” Micah said.
“There’s one jutting off the ass end of this motel,” she told him.
“I think he meant one where the cockroaches don’t have name tags,” said Ebenezer.
“It will do,” said Micah.
She waved her hand again. “Go on, then. Scat.”
They did. The door shut behind them. She sat in the shadow of the noose. She ran her hand over her freshly shorn scalp. She always liked to get a buzz cut before trying to snip her mortal cord. She had this weird fear that some shitty, unscrupulous undertaker would sell her hair to a wig shop. Stupid, the things people worry about. She shut her eyes—but something leapt up, a long-forgotten shape that shone a delirious bone white in the darkness behind her eyelids. She jolted, opening them.
