Little Heaven

by Nick Cutter

  “I don’t know, just off. Kind of, well . . . cruel. The other day my wife found him out back of our bunkhouse watching a big ole green grasshopper die in a jar of gasoline. When she asked what he was doing, Ben said that grasshoppers breathe through their sides—like, imagine if we had little mouths all down our ribs, sucking in air. He had a book of matches, too. My guess was that he was gonna wait until the bug was nearly drowned before fishing it out and lighting it up.”

  Charlie shook his head. “That isn’t my boy. He’ll collect bugs, sure, and toads and snakes and what all. But he puts them in a shoe box with cotton batting so they’re good and comfy. He makes sure to poke holes in the lid. He likes the idea of owning them, I guess, and studying them, but he lets them go when he gets bored. Ben’s never purposefully killed them. And it’s one thing to thoughtlessly squash a bug to see the yellow of their guts squirt out—boys do that, and the Lord forgives them. It’s another thing to torture them, then light them on fire. That takes real consideration. Takes planning.”

  Charlie shook his head again. “I gave Ben a proper hiding when I heard. Bent him over my knee and beat the white off his ass. Wasn’t right, Lord knows. I think I was more scared than him, because it’s like waking up to find something that isn’t quite your son sleeping in your son’s bed. Ben didn’t cry out or anything. He kept looking up as I spanked him like to say, That all you got, Pops?”

  “A lot of people acting weird in Little Heaven,” Ellen said softly.

  “It’s not always been so,” said Charlie. “The first bunch of months were great, just like the Rev said they would be. But lately, with the animals in the woods and the dogs going missing and the kids acting out of turn and now this with Eli . . .”

  Micah said, “Do you think the Reverend will let you go?”

  Charlie’s hands balled into fists. “We came willingly.”

  Micah said, “Even still.”

  “I worry about Cyril and Virgil,” Charlie admitted. “What they might do.”

  Micah stared at Charlie. “Our other guns are back at the campsite.”

  Charlie nodded. “I had your pistols, but Cyril, he took ’em.”

  “You really think we’ll have to blast our way out of here?” said Ellen. “Have things gotten that nuts?”

  Things can get nuts pretty fast, Micah thought. He knew it. He’d seen it.

  Minerva said, “There’s something else in these woods.”

  Everyone looked at her. A flush crept up her throat.

  “Just something hostile,” she went on, undeterred. “I felt it the other night, searching for the boy. A million eyes scuttling over my skin. I don’t care if that sounds stupid. Maybe I’m going a little nuts myself.” She stared at them, her jaw fixed tight. “This fucking place.”

  Nobody disputed her sense of things.

  22

  THEY DEPARTED MIDAFTERNOON. Micah, Minerva, Charlie, and Otis. As it turned out, it was an easy matter to slip away. The Reverend and his hired men were currently taken up with Eli. Not long before they left, Micah had spotted Cyril exiting the windowless bunkhouse where Eli was being kept. The man looked green around the gills.

  Ellen agreed to stay back with Ebenezer. If anyone noticed they were missing, she would tell them the God’s honest truth—they had gone to recover their belongings from the campsite and would soon return for their injured friend.

  “Be careful,” she told Micah. “We need you back here.”

  Micah wondered: Was she worried they wouldn’t come back? Did she think they might get the guns and continue to the car, pedal to the metal, tear-assing eighty miles an hour away from Little Heaven?

  They set off under an overcast sky. They walked through a forest drained of life. Not a peep, not a rustle. Charlie had his rifle and pistol. Otis had a compound bow and a quiver of hunting arrows.

  “I don’t think you’ll find much to shoot at,” Minerva told him.

  Otis nodded. “I haven’t spotted so much as a sparrow.”

  They chatted to pass the time. Minerva asked Otis how he had come to know the Reverend.

  “I’ve been with him going on fifteen years now,” he told her. “Long before Charlie came along. I was a pill head when Reverend Flesher found me. Staggering around the Tenderloin chock-full of drugs. I’m ashamed to tell you how I laid my hands on them, but that’s the way of that particular devil—you’ll do anything to please it.” He hung his head, humiliated at the memory of the man he’d been. “The Rev took me in. I was one of his first. I just looked at him and knew. The Lord speaks through this man. My folks raised me serious southern Baptist, but I fell away from the path. The Rev dragged me back on it. I helped stain and sand the floor in his new chapel, and I slept there at night. It gave me something to do with my hands. Helped keep the devil at bay. That, and the Reverend’s sermons. Then later, when he said he’s taking his flock into the unspoiled wilderness, away from all the wickedness and vice—I said, sign me up!”

  “And it was good,” Charlie said. “Real good for a stretch here.”

  “That’s a fact,” said Otis. “Little Heaven was just that. Heaven on earth. And now the clouds have rolled in. But the devil tests us, and he tests the Reverend most of all—because Satan knows if he can break the Rev’s resolve, he can snatch our souls. But the Reverend won’t let it happen.” Otis’s voice rose to the pitch of a true believer. “No, sir. He’s gonna walk Satan down and stomp a mudhole in his ass, pardon my French—”

  “Ah, we’re all friends here,” said Minerva.

  “The Reverend’s going to send Old Splitfoot back down to the pit,” Otis went on. “We just got to stay the course in our hearts and spirits. If we have to leave for a spell while the Reverend wages this battle, well . . . dark days, sure, but we’ve been through them before. Reverend Flesher has always guided us out.”

  Charlie said, “Amen to that.”

  They walked in silence until they came upon the pit. It was empty, the bottom filled with groundwater. They continued on, glimpsing few signs of the things that had pursued them nights ago. The odd snapped branch, ripped bark torn off trees, even a few pines torn out at the roots—but the damage seemed random, following no particular path.

  Darkness was coming on by the time they reached the campsite. Their tents were undisturbed. Nothing had been torn apart or scattered. Micah crawled inside his tent and retrieved his second Tokarev pistol and several boxes of ammunition. He also found the long-bore Tarpley rifle. He felt reassured by its sturdiness. Heavy as a blunderbuss.

  Minerva retrieved several boxes of ammunition for her own guns, currently in Cyril’s possession. She exited the tent with a small revolver.

  “I found it in Ellen’s pack,” she said. “.38 police special.” She laughed. “Who would have figured Little Miss Bellhaven was packing heat? What a hellcat, uh?”

  Maybe Ellen had brought it thinking she could take her nephew from Little Heaven by force. A desperate move, in Micah’s opinion. One that could have gotten her killed. He didn’t like to picture Ellen dead—and yet he did. Just for a flash.

  They sat round the fire pit as dusk settled between the trees. A cool wind howled over the grass, making each blade sing like a tiny instrument.

  “We have no choice but to make camp here,” said Micah. “Return tomorrow morning.”

  Micah caught Minerva’s unspoken worry: What if those things are still hanging around? He had no assurance they weren’t, but it seemed wiser to batten down in a spot with clean sight lines and establish a watch rather than hike back through the unlit woods.

  “Reverend’s gonna know we’ve been gone for sure now,” said Otis.

  Charlie nodded. “Got to accept it. We’ll make our amends if it comes to that.”

  They got a fire going. They ate the food Micah and the others had bought back in Grinder’s Switch—it was completely untouched, even the bread. They skewered bits of Spam on sharpened sticks and grilled it over the fire. It tasted bad, and not just because it was
Spam: some bitterness in the wood imparted a foul essence into the meat. Being ravenous, they ate it anyway.

  One of them would have to keep watch. Micah volunteered to take the first shift. Minerva took one tent. Charlie and Otis bedded down in the other.

  Micah fed the fire. Acrid smoke spiraled up. The flames warped the woods beyond, creating shapes where there were none.

  He would sit that way, nearly unblinking, for many hours.

  23

  THE NIGHT AFTER he returned to Little Heaven, Eli Rathbone paid a visit to Nate.

  They weren’t even friends, not as Nate saw it. Eli had always been kinda mean—and he’d gotten a lot meaner the past few weeks, right up until he vanished into the woods.

  Eli was a tall, skinny redhead with a wiry frame and bony hands. He liked to hold the smaller kids down and give them the Rooster Peck: sitting on their chests and jabbing his fingers into their breastbone while they struggled to name ten chocolate bars, which was the only way to get him to stop.

  Milky Way . . . uh, ah, AH—Hershey bar, aaaaah! Payday! Milky Way!

  You said that one already, dummy. Start again!

  He’d done it to Nate, too. Elton and Billy Redhill laughed when Nate had gotten hung up on nine. His brain froze. He could think of any number of candies and gums and soda pops—Flipsticks, Lemonheads, Black Bart, SweeTarts, Frostie Root Beer!—but not one stupid chocolate bar. Eli’s fingers punched into his breastbone so hard that Nate had been sure his chest would cave in.

  “Scooter Pie!” he had screamed.

  Eli said, “Judges?”

  Elton and Billy shook their heads. “Nah, that’s a cookie,” said Elton.

  Eli grinned. “Start over!”

  Eli could be mean as rattlesnake venom, as Nate’s grandmother might say. But he was sweet as pie when the Reverend came around. A real honey-dripper—a suck-up. Eli knew the Bible well. His ability to recite catechism made him one of the Reverend’s favorites, although it seemed to Nate that the Reverend looked at kids the way Nate looked at the monkeys at the zoo.

  And it was Eli’s voice Nate heard now. He could swear it, even though that would be crazy. Eli’s voice, coming from the darkness just beyond his bunkhouse window.

  Nate . . . wake up, Nate . . .

  When Nate first showed up, Eli hadn’t been bullying anybody. Back then they were supervised by Missus Hughes, a foreboding woman who didn’t take any sass. But then Missus Hughes broke her leg and had to leave. The kids had been left to do whatever they wanted, pretty much; their only obligation was to attend the sermons. Eli used this newfound freedom to torment his chosen targets.

  Eli hadn’t always been quite so nasty. Rooster Pecks, sure, but that was the same sort of treatment Nate had received from bullies back home. Everyone had to deal with bullies, Nate reasoned, until you became an adult, at which point everyone stopped acting so mean . . . except that his dad’s old boss, Postmaster Jim, was a bully, too—a grown-up version of Eli. He used to make fun of his father to his face, even when Nate was right there. “Sunny” Jim would slap his father between the shoulder blades so hard that his dad would stagger, and laugh and say something like, You’d be better off in a flower shop, wouldn’t you, Reg, pruning pansies. And the other mailmen would laugh, which was what kids did, too—laughed along with the bully so they didn’t get picked on themselves.

  It was times like that when Nate wished his mom was still around. She would have slapped Sunny Jim in front of everyone for speaking that way—which was sad when you thought about it, because Nate’s father wouldn’t even defend himself. Nate often wondered why his mother even loved his father, or vice versa; they were so unalike it was as if they were different species. But if Sunny Jim were to say, You need your wife to defend you, Reg? his mother would slap him again. And if Sunny Jim ever raised his hand to her in return, she’d find something sharp to stick him with. And if ole Sunny Jim did the same to her, well, Nate was sure his mom would get a gun next. Her temper wasn’t just hot; it was lava. She went supernova.

  Which was why she was in jail. Society frowned on people who couldn’t keep their rage in check—even if they were defending someone they loved. But his mom wasn’t in jail for that reason. She broke the law trying to make money. And even though she had cried and told Nate she only did it for him, he couldn’t fully forgive her—because her crimes meant he had to move with his father to Little Heaven.

  Nate rolled over in bed. The cot springs squealed. It was dark inside the bunkhouse. His father snored a few feet away. They used to live in a house. A teensy three-bedroom with a postage stamp lawn, but still. Now they lived in something a hunter might squat in while trapping minks in the winter. There was no indoor plumbing, so Nate had to use the outhouse. Sometimes he had to pee at night, which meant he had to cross the square to the jakes, as they were called, and squat over a pool of dark, smelly waste. As he tried to force his pee out, something would scratch-scratch on the outhouse. Just the branches of a tree, he knew, but at three o’clock he couldn’t help picturing a witch, all dried up and pruney with teeth like busted periwinkle shells, raking her nails on the boards behind his head. His piss tube would clamp shut in fear. Some nights he lay in bed in abject agony, his bladder bursting, cursing himself for having that second glass of water at dinner. Better his bladder burst, better he soak the mattress with pee, than he have to crouch in that outhouse with those witch’s nails scraping at him.

  Nate got out of bed. The bunkhouse was cold. His bare legs broke out in gooseflesh.

  The phosphorescent hands on the alarm clock read 2:55 a.m. He screwed his knuckles into his eyes and stared blearily at the window. Nothing there . . .

  . . . but he could feel something out in the dark. Just a few feet away from the window. Waiting.

  Little Heaven hadn’t been quite so bad when they first showed up, but Nate had never felt at home here. His mom didn’t put much stock in religion—People can eat whatever they want, she’d said, but they better not show up on my doorstep asking if I want a bite of their apple—so Nate was at a disadvantage from the start, seeing as he didn’t know the Bible. He had to wear thick wool pants to every service; now his legs itched like fire whenever the Reverend even opened his mouth—this was called a Pavlovian response. Nate had learned that back at his old school, where they studied things like science and the human brain. Such things weren’t talked about at Little Heaven. Science gets in the way of our communion with the Lord, Nate was told. He missed his old school. He missed other things, too. TV and comic books and the smell of the dime-store vanilla perfume the girls in his class used to wear and even the smell of car exhaust and of cigarettes in movie theaters—even though, if you’d asked him, he would have told you he’d never miss tailpipe fumes and throat-itching Marlboro smoke, not in a million years. What Nate really missed was going places in cars. Just like he missed watching movies at the theater. But that all got mixed up in his head with the bad smells associated with those joys—and he couldn’t give voice to those more sophisticated thoughts. He was a boy. He just felt.

  The Reverend didn’t pay much mind to Nate or his father; they were late joiners, low on the totem pole. It didn’t seem to bother his dad, but it bugged Nate a whole bunch. And things had been going downhill for a while. Everyone looked different. Skinnier and wasted away. Even Nate. He hated looking at himself in the mirror now. It was hard to put a finger on it. There was no cause for it, which was why nobody talked about that stuff. This was where the Lord had led them. Why would He lead them into sorrow?

  But Nate could feel it. Something working all around him. As if the air were filled with a trillion invisible mouths, each mouth studded with microscopic teeth, all those mouths gnawing at you all day long. Or—an even worse imagining—those same tiny mouths all over the ground, every inch, but instead of teeth, each mouth had a needle tongue that jabbed into everybody’s feet, sucking the way a mosquito sucks, funneling everyone’s energy into a pale bloated sack like a stomach deep
under the earth. A single tube led from that stomach even deeper underground, where it nourished something much larger and more terrible—

  Nate was now walking toward the bunkhouse window. He didn’t want to. He was exquisitely aware of this. More than anything he wanted to slip back into bed and pull the covers over his head and . . . pray. He hardly ever prayed for real. Yes, he could recite the words and cross himself and all that paint-by-numbers stuff, but he wasn’t asking for anything or talking to God man to man. In his life, he had really prayed only a few times. When his mother got put in jail, he prayed that God would keep her safe because he used to watch Dragnet and some of the people Joe Friday put in the clink were tough tickets and he wanted his mom to be safe if she got a cell mate named Big Bertha or Hellcat Hettie. He had prayed for his dad a few times, too, because even though he was a wimp—and it was horrible that a boy would already understand this about his father—Nate thought his dad was essentially a good man.

  But Nate wanted to pray now. Oh yes. He wanted to hear God’s voice and be reassured. But he couldn’t because his feet kept guiding him toward the window. Toward Eli’s voice—which didn’t sound much like Eli’s normal voice. It sounded clogged. As if Eli’s throat were packed with potting soil or rotted sewage, so that what came out of his mouth was a choked gargle.

  Nate . . . don’t be a pussy like your daddy the mailman. Come see me. No Rooster Pecks, honest Injun . . .

  His father snorted in his sleep. Nate tried to call out—Dad, wake up!—but his throat was so dry that nothing came out, like trying to whistle with a mouthful of soda crackers.

  It wasn’t just how everyone at Little Heaven had started to look lately, either. It was how they acted. In the beginning, the kids had all been normal. More religious than Nate was used to, sure, but pretty much like everyone else he knew from his old school. He would join them after breakfast and Missus Hughes would have them read their Bible and do Christian crossword puzzles and stuff like that. After the midday sermon, they had supervised playtime. The kids welcomed Nate outwardly, it being the right thing to do.