Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Ellen’s sister and Nate moved to the nearest town. There wasn’t much they could do. They sat by Ellen’s bed and talked to her. They read books out loud; Nate would record himself reading books on cassettes, which Micah would play on the tape player in her room. The doctors said that might work; they said that Ellen might follow a familiar voice up out of the fog.

He slept beside her at night. Sometimes she turned to him, one of the moisture pads slipping off the convex of her eyes. Staring at him in the moonlight bleeding through the curtains—the light’s on, but nobody’s home. Or was somebody home? Was Ellen behind those eyes, trapped inside her own skull, screaming to be let out? She did not make a noise on those nights—except sometimes, in a whisper so hushed he could barely make it out, she would say: “Please, no. Please stop.” Those words iced his heart. What was happening inside her head? What horrors was she living through? He whispered to her: “Please wake up.” But he knew, in a complex chamber of his heart, that she would not—because of him. He had wished this upon her.

My dearest love will never leave me.

Had that been it? His wish? It must have been something like that, if not those words exactly—it hadn’t been anything expressible in words, anyway, and the creature hadn’t needed him to say it. It had simply reached into his heart and plucked it out.

You’d go to pieces… Never leave me.

And the creature had delivered, hadn’t it? Oh yes, in full. He wanted Ellen to be with him forever, never leaving his side. That had been his cowardly, heartsick wish. And so he’d gotten it. Lock, stock, and barrel.

“I am so sorry,” he whispered into her ear. “I never wanted this.”

And yet he had done it. His wish had put her there in that bed, beyond all remedy.

He thought about it. Going to the black rock. Asking that thing for Ellen’s release. But he had his daughter to consider, and he sensed it didn’t work that way. He had to wait. Suffer, as Ebenezer and Minerva were surely suffering. That was part of it. Perhaps the most crucial part. The suffering.

So they lived there—a man and his daughter and the woman they both loved—on the edge of some greater catastrophe that never quite arrived. But Micah understood that someday it would come to drag him back into the fray.

And then, one lonely night when the stars shone especially bright, the black thing’s henchman had come and taken his daughter.

Which is when it began all over again—because such things never truly ended, did they? The wheel went around and around. You rode along and it changed you. You didn’t change the wheel. It kept turning and turning until it was time to take that final spin.

FIRE IS THE GREAT PURIFIER.

The woods came back. The flames died down and the ashes nourished new life. It was not long before green shoots were pushing through a crackling layer of slag.

The shoots became trees and shrubs; the forest thrived as it had before. The woods climbed the hillsides and filled out the valleys in crisp chlorophyll green. Long alleys of undergrowth cast sprawling shadows so dense that it was chilly in their shade on even the warmest summer days. Wildflowers scattered knolls between sweeping boughs of oak and cottonwood; foxgloves and bracken shone redly in the broad sunshine. Deep thickets and spongy undergrowth sprang up; bramble and buckthorn and tangled knots of poison oak lay over the ground in heavy abundance, dank and choking.

The animals returned in time. The woods teemed with the smallest forms of life at first. The industry of ants, the scuttling of beetles. Then the chirp of birds and the scamper of rodents. Soon the animals that made a meal of those lower orders of life returned, too—the foxes and opossums and lynxes and wolves. Everything grew and spread and became whole again. The shadows stretched, and in them, life went on as it always had.

The black rock was there, too. It had been there forever.

No living creature approached its sheer cliffs. The animals and even the insects steered clear—something warned them off. Nothing grew upon the rock, or even near it. In the deepest hour of night, a sound could sometimes be heard emanating from it. A prolonged sigh. Was it of contentment, or of unspeakable pain? Impossible to tell.

The black rock stood within itself, brooding and implacable.

It waited as it always had. For that wheel to come round again.

YOUR DADDY OWES MY DADDY.

The Long Walker traveled on. Petty followed helplessly, her hand engulfed in its own. The woods are lovely, dark and deep —that was a line from a poem her mother read to her years ago, before slipping into her big sleep.

The trees creaked in a gentle breeze that ruffled the hem of Petty’s nightgown. She wasn’t cold or hungry or thirsty, though she should be all of those things by now. Here and there the boughs dropped away to give a view of the sky salted with bright stars.

Your daddy owes my daddy…

The Long Walker had told her this at the start of their journey. What had her father done, and to whom? Her dad was a strong and clever man, but she doubted he would double-cross anyone, especially anything that might count the Long Walker as its son.

The Long Walker spidered up the side of a cliff, its feet finding hidden grooves in the rock. It cradled Petty lovingly; with her ear pressed to its chest, she could hear the strange workings of its insides: a cresting buzz, as if its chest was all honeycombs crawling with wasps.

The trees grew sickly and sparse. A huge formation came into view: darker than the night sky, with a density that made her body shrink inside her skin. Was the Long Walker taking her there? She couldn’t even imagine it.

I will go crazy , she thought simply.

She knew that wasn’t how it happened. People didn’t “go crazy,” not all at once. It was something that occurred more slowly. A person starts to hear voices, or she thinks people are looking at her when really they’re not. Those worries get worse, and that person slowly slips into insanity. But Petty could see it happening another way, too. A person experiences something so horrible that it tears her brain in half—a crack zigzagging across a frozen river, the black madness pouring in all at once.

The trees gave way to a sandy slope leading to the monolithic rock. She tried to jerk her hand out of the Long Walker’s grip. It laughed softly at her struggles.

“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to go.”

“ One two three four five six seven ,” it said in a voice Pet recognized as her own mother’s. “ All good children go to heaven. ”

“Don’t.” Her cheeks flushed with anger despite her fear. “Don’t you talk like her, you… you asshole ,” she said, summoning the vilest word she knew.

The Long Walker grinned, perhaps admiring her spunk. The towering shadow of the rock cast over them even in the dead of night. Coldness seeped off of it, and a faraway sense of panic wormed into her veins.

“Have you ever heard a newborn cry as it awakes from a nightmare?” the Long Walker asked. Petty was too stunned by its question to reply.

“A newborn, only a few days old,” it went on. “They have nightmares, but not as you would understand. Their minds are unformed, as was your own at that age. A newborn baby can still see the world behind the world, you see? The world where my daddy lives, and me and a few others like us. They can still see us. That’s why they scream as they do.”