Lee Goldberg: Hell in Heaven

Heaven.

That’s what the sign at the exit said. Heaven, Washington, elevation 5,100 feet, population 136. Except that the last digit had been crossed out and replaced with a seven, followed by an exclamation point in black spray paint.

Matt hadn’t intended to stop this morning. His plan was to ride straight on through the day, stopping only for gas when he saw a station, keep going until he was too tired to stay on the bike. These mountains were beautiful, but he wasn’t here for the scenery. He was on a mission.

He’d started out hitchhiking, but quickly got frustrated at how much time he was spending standing on the sides of empty roads. So he used three-quarters of his cash to buy a slightly dented, ten-year-old Buell Blast motorcycle from the widow of its last owner and headed out Route 20 on two wheels. That took him across the Cascades in the northern part of the state and kept him away from the big cities. He didn’t know where he would find Mr. Dark, but he was pretty sure that a man-if that was what Mr. Dark was-who thrived on evil would find himself more comfortable in a major metropolitan area than Matt, whose one foray to Seattle for his 21st birthday had left him stunned by the number of people who could be packed into one small place.

At first the freedom had been exhilarating. It was just him, the bike, and the open road. He’d spent his entire life-and his entire death-in a small town in a small corner of a small state. Now the world spread out in front of him.

Trouble was, it kept spreading. Matt rode his entire first day without seeing another person, except for the long-haulers way up in the cabs of their logging trucks. The second day wasn’t any different, except that his muscles were stiffer. By the end of the third he could barely bring himself to set up his small tent.

None of this would have mattered if things had been going more as he’d assumed. He’d figured that as soon as he hit the road he’d see signs of evil everywhere and they’d lead him directly to Mr. Dark.

But if Mr. Dark was out there, he was doing a good job of hiding himself.

He’d already used his only lead, and he hadn’t come across anything that looked like a second. The bike might have been faster than trying to hitch rides, but it still wasn’t getting him anywhere. When he set out that morning, he decided to give this one more day, and if nothing happened spend some quality time working on plan C.

Matt had been going for a little more than an hour when he saw the sign. Heaven, next exit, five miles ahead.

It almost made him break out laughing. What better place for a dead man to pass a little time than Heaven? If nothing else, it would be a break in the monotony.

Matt took the hard right turn off the highway and found himself on a one-lane road that wound even higher into the mountains. It twisted and turned for what felt like hours, and Matt began to think he’d made a mistake taking the exit.

Then the road straightened out. He crested a small hill, and then gasped in shock as he saw the tiny town spread out in front of him.

It wasn’t the place itself that took his breath away, although Heaven wasn’t exactly what he’d expected. He’d been through enough of these tiny Cascades towns to anticipate the mix of tumble-down shotgun shacks and sagging doublewides, the second-tier fast-food franchise next to the shuttered video rental outlet and the not-quite-super store with its bargain prices across the street from the struggling local market, the one that still carried animal feed and replacement parts for wood-burning stoves and all those other bits and pieces that no one could be bothered to mass produce in China.

Heaven seemed to have skipped the commercial revolution of the late 20th century. There was a general store that, from its hand-painted and weathered signs advertising feed and tack, tackle and firewood, seemed to be strictly local. If Dairy Queen or Foster’s Freeze had ever established a beachhead here, they had been driven out by Mabel’s Eat Fresh Diner Cafe, which looked like it had stood on its corner for a century.

As Matt glanced up the short main street he realized that there wasn’t anything here that didn’t look like it had been built before the invention of modern construction materials and techniques. None of the pre-fab structures that had polluted the main street of even so insignificant a town as the one he’d grown up in. The storefronts were all wood and peeling paint. Matt couldn’t see much down the few dirt roads that extended off the main drag, but what he did see was mostly small bungalows, well-maintained but tiny, with metal chimneys for the wood stoves and nothing that suggested indoor plumbing.

That was only slightly strange. There were probably dozens of similar little villages scattered all through the Cascades, logging towns that had thrived briefly during one boom or another, then faded away over the years. If there was anything weird about this town it was only that the state had bothered to put up a sign at the highway exit.

And it was no real surprise that the main street was deserted. For all he could tell, Heaven might have been abandoned decades ago. Or maybe it had been built as a set for some movie that had come and gone while he’d been dead, and these buildings were nothing but facades left to melt away in the rain and snow.

What took Matt’s breath away, what hit him with such force it nearly threw him back over the end of the motorcycle, was the banner that hung over Main Street, stretched between the grocery store and the bank.

The banner that read: WELCOME HOME, MATT.

As Matt’s bike moved closer to the banner, he began to realize that this town wasn’t deserted. There were people in all the windows.

Not that he saw any of them. Not directly, anyway. They seemed to be hiding behind doors and curtains and blinds. But every time he turned his head, he saw faint traces of movement, as if someone had just ducked out of sight.

Not much of a welcome, Matt thought. String a banner, then hide.

He was just about to gun the engine and lean into the u-turn that would take him back to the highway when he heard a bell ding behind him. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the door of the general store swing open.

A young girl took one hesitant step onto the sidewalk. She looked like she was about eleven, with long black pigtails hanging down over a blue calico dress and black boots on her feet. She stared at him intensely, then took another step closer.

A hand reached out from inside the store, but the girl shrugged it off. “It’s him,” she said. “It’s Matt.”

The girl moved out of the doorway. It was like popping the cork of a champagne bottle. People flooded out of the store and into the street. And it wasn’t just the store-people were emerging cautiously from the diner and the doctor’s office and the mechanic’s garage.

They came out into the street, but they wouldn’t come close to him. They all stayed what Matt realized would have been a “safe distance” if he’d been a wild animal that had wandered into town. That gave him a chance to study them as they did him.

Once again Matt had the sensation of wandering into a time warp or a movie set, although at first he couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly odd about the people of Heaven, Washington. They looked like the same worn-down, hard-working people you’d find in any small town in America. There were old men with the cracked and calloused hands that come from a long lifetime doing manual labor. There were young women, barely out of girlhood, cradling babies in their arms. There were husbands and wives whose stress-lined faces made their ages impossible to read. And of course there were the children peeking out from behind their parents’ legs to get a glimpse of the stranger, then ducking back again, giggling. They all seemed to be related, or at least there were a couple of strong gene pools dominating the population, as similar features repeated on face after face. But that was hardly a surprise in a town of this size.