Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Survivor trauma, the shrinks call it.

Fire is the grand reducer. The heat of a forest fire can reach 2,672 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to melt carbon steel. Little Heaven disappeared in the most conclusive way: it burned, carbonized, and drifted away on the wind. Every structure, every body, everything. Gone. There is no way to sift the leavings and make much sense of what happened there. Only questions remain. Were they all dead already when the fire swept over the hillside? If so, how? If not, why didn’t they flee when the fire began to burn down upon them? They would have had time to abandon everything and run. They might have even made it out at a brisk walk, had they seen the fire early enough.

But that didn’t happen. Every adult died—or if not, they are nowhere to be found. They have not resurfaced anywhere and have yet to reclaim their children. The only sane reasoning is that they are gone. The hows and whys may never be known.

“I hope he’s burning in hell,” Sister Muriel says when I ask after the fate of Reverend Amos Flesher. She has a highly developed sense of divine retribution, and she lets it be known that God would not have it any other way. “Sure as I have breath in my body, that boy is roasting in the fiery pit. I hope the Devil gives him a few extra pokes with his pitchfork for me. Evil little bastard. The dirty fiddler.”

Letter postmarked June 8, 1969. Girdler, Kentucky:

Dear Slimeball

So. I guess I’m glad you’re not dead. Congratulations on living.

MICAH FOUND ELLEN AGAIN,just as he said he would. And she was sure he’d come, though it took longer than she would have liked. She had made him a new eye by then, which was good, because he showed up wearing that ratty old patch.

“You’d go to pieces without me” was the first thing she said to him.

It became a familiar refrain. You’d go to pieces. In time, it proved to be true. A man can go his whole life never needing anyone. But when he finally finds the one, he can’t live without her.

Ellen had been living with Nate in the town nearest her sister’s jail. By then, Ellen had put it all out in the open to her nephew. Ellen was his aunt. She had been sent by Nate’s mother to check in on Nate at Little Heaven. Ellen had hired Micah and the other two.

Nate took it all pretty well. Kids didn’t suffer so much with cognitive dissonance. He missed his father, despite how badly Reggie had unraveled in his final days. It wasn’t his fault, Nate reasoned privately to himself. It was a lot to ask, and more than his father had been fit to bear. Nate wished his last memories of his father weren’t so negative. He wished he hadn’t seen his body on the grass in front of the chapel, his forehead… He wished he hadn’t seen that, but he knew, having seen it, that he always would.

He went back to school. His teachers remarked on what a pleasant, thoughtful boy Nate was—though they might have said in the privacy of the teacher’s lounge, over a quickly puffed cigarette, that he was more remote and somehow harder than a boy his age ought to be. As if Nate had suffered extreme pressures that had diamondized him. And those sparkling, diamond-like aspects of Nate were just a little off-putting. They made a person feel nervous, even when the boy gave you no good reason to feel that way in his presence.

Micah rented a room in the same town. Nobody there knew their histories.

At one point, a reporter came rolling in. Fussy guy with a Virginian accent, always wore a crisp vanilla-white suit. With one of the big-city dailies, he said. Had a hot tip that one or more of the survivors of the Little Heaven fire might be living right here. Well, that put a bug up the town’s collective ass. But Micah was glad that the reporter wasn’t much good at his job, and that he went away empty-handed to pursue some story about astronauts.

The three of them spent every waking minute together. Before long Ellen’s sister earned an early parole, time served for good behavior. Ellen helped her get reacquainted with life outside the walls. Then Nate moved back in with his mother. After that, it was time to go. Ellen had a new life to get on with. One that now included Micah.

For Micah’s part, he left it all behind. The gun-for-hire work. He had no other skills, but he was willing to learn. They got married in a small chapel in Santa Cruz. They bought a ranch and settled down. Micah wasn’t much of a herdsman or a farmer, but still, things had a way of working out. Money flowed to him, easy as water. Some said he had the devil’s own luck. If they only knew.

They were never far from the black rock. At first, they saw themselves as guardians of a sort. Sentinels. It was only a matter of hours to reach it, though neither of them had the smallest desire to make that journey. That place lived deep inside their minds, implacable as a pebble in their shoes. In time, though, they forgot about the rock—their conscious minds did, anyway. But it twisted away in their under-brains, as such things are wont to.

They had a child. Their greatest joy. Micah wept the day Petty was born. When she got sick as an infant, he sat up all night beside her crib, rocking her when she cried. And if, as she got older, Petty sensed a distance from her father, well, he was distant with everybody except her mother. He was not cold or unloving with Pet, and he was wildly protective of her—just, he seemed unable to open himself to her completely, as other fathers might. He carried an inarticulate sorrow that a man of few words was incapable of expressing.

Then one morning Micah’s wife, Petty’s mother, didn’t wake up.

Micah rose that morning to find her still sleeping. He got up to make breakfast. He found it strange that she would be asleep, as she was usually up before him. When he came back, she had not woken. He laughed under his breath—he was not a man for laughter, but Ellen could provoke it in him for almost no reason at all—and ate his breakfast alone. Petty woke and dressed and ate and went outside to play. Micah watched her run through the field, the crisp morning light falling through her spread fingers.

He went into the bedroom. Ellen was still sleeping. Her chest rose and fell; her eyeballs zipped around under her lids. There was something profound about her sleep. A seam of worry split Micah’s mind. He gripped her shoulder gently.

“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.