Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Petty swallowed hard. “Because they’re… they’re scared of you?”

“No, precious. Because they don’t want us to leave them.”

They reached a cleft in the rock. The Long Walker guided her inside. It had to stoop to make its way through the dark and twisting cavern. They went deeper and deeper, until the light died. The Long Walker was untroubled by the darkness, though—it navigated as if by some kind of sonar, never stumbling, bearing Petty quickly along. There came a faint squishing from overhead, but that quickly dwindled. The mineral smell of the rock invaded Petty’s nostrils. She stepped on something that made a metallic rattle under her feet. She caught a glimpse of a child’s toy browned with rust.

They came to a drop. A rope ladder was rolled up at the ledge, its rungs salted with dust that had accumulated over a period of years. The Long Walker sat, its legs dangling over the edge. It had no need of the ladder; it skinned down the rocks, carrying Petty effortlessly. At the bottom was another tunnel. The Long Walker urged her inside of it—Petty had stopped fighting, realizing it was useless to try. It swept in behind her, its body filling the entire tunnel. She couldn’t see a thing, yet she never bumped a wall or hit a dead end. She might as well have been moving through outer space.

They crawled for some time. Petty didn’t even think she was crawling—she was motionless, her limbs made sluggish with worry, and yet she moved. The Long Walker propelled her forward through some manner of infernal mechanics; she felt as if she were on a moving walkway, or had been harnessed to a remorseless winch that was pulling her toward… likely nothing she’d ever want to meet.

The tunnel emptied into what her senses told her was an enormous vault—the air wasn’t as tight, and she got an impression of vastness, as if she’d stepped into a warehouse. But she still couldn’t see anything. That was frightening enough. It was like waking in the middle of the night in your bed and waiting for your eyes to adjust. But at least then you’re still in your warm bed, in your house, with your parents not far away. Here she was totally alone…

No. There was something else in here.

That’s what was raising the hackles on her neck, what was making the flesh crawl up her throat.

“I’m home, Daddy.” The Long Walker danced, limbs swinging and kicking. “Home again, home again, jiggety jig.”

It pranced into the center of the space toward whatever it was that inspired fright to flutter like a bird’s wings in Petty’s chest. Its body kicked off a weird deep-sea glow… and that’s where Petty may as well have been right now: a hundred miles under the surface of the deepest sea, hopelessly alone.

The light of its body touched the shape of another shape. Petty staggered back with a scream rising in her throat.

I will go crazy in a second was the thought that rabbited through her mind. And maybe that’s for the best.

MICAH, MINERVA, AND EBENEZERset off from the godforsaken cabin before daybreak. Minerva was plagued by worries that its luckless occupant might peel himself from his perch upon the wall and shamble forth, blood spluttering from the severed stump of his neck, to avenge the loss of his head—which was by then a roasted, hatchet-cleaved husk in the stove.

They had debated burying the poor man’s remains, but that was a problematical proposition, owing to the fact that his body, while indeed headless, was still moving : the legs quivering, the arms spasming against the heavy pelt tacks pierced through his flesh. Even trying to bury a motionless body would tax both their energy and sanity, which was already somewhat on the trembling edge—as such, they regretfully opted to leave him hanging on the wall.

Having made their decision, they hunkered down a couple hundred yards from the cabin. But the proximity was too much for Minerva: she kept hearing the choking, garbled laughter of the hunter’s decapitated head as it baked in the stove; she swore that she could overhear his spiteful chuckles spindling up through the tin chimney and atomizing into the air like so much lunacy-inducing smoke.

“Let’s go,” she said to them before dawn had even broken.

They walked, resolutely. Their bodies ached, joints screaming. They were fifteen years older than they’d been the last time they made this trek. The land was unchanged, but they were different. Gray hair, wrinkles, shot nerves. Ebenezer’s knee felt as though it had been hollowed out and packed full of fire ants. As the hills grew steeper, Minerva regretted every belt of gutrot whiskey she’d drunk and every unfiltered cigarette she’d smoked in the interceding years. The fear was what wearied them the most—fear had a terrible way of getting inside your chest, sucking at you like a vampire until every step became a misery.

But the nearer they came to the black rock, the more their pains receded. Exhaustion and thirst and hunger deserted them. Their pace actually picked up. Micah had heard that people who perished of hypothermia felt the same way: their brains kicked out a powerful natural narcotic that caused a rosy glow to settle over their minds as their organs froze inside of them.

They spoke as they walked. The darkness unlocked their lips—they spoke, if only to drive that blackness away. They raised questions of an unanswerable nature that had dogged them the last fifteen years.

“What do you think it is?” Minerva asked. “I’ve always wondered. A demon?”

“Mammon,” said Ebenezer. “Demon of greed. A minor demon, but even a minor one is cause for alarm, right?” A wan laugh. “ No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. Scripture of Matthew. I saw an old painting in a book. This hunched, goblinny thing. For a while I’d thought…”

They followed the shadowed path. Creatures stirred faintly in the underbrush.

“But I don’t think so now,” Eb went on. “If I believed it was a demon, then I would have to believe in its opposite, in God, the pantheon of angels and all the rest. And despite the fact that I see His face every night—or what that thing will have me believe is His face—I do not trust in God’s existence.”

“What about the other thing?” said Minerva. “Ole daddy longlegs that you lit up like a Roman candle?”

Ebenezer shrugged. “A familiar? Same as a black cat to a witch? What I want to know is why it doesn’t leave. Think about it. What it did to all the animals in these woods—what it turned them into. What it must have done to the minds of Amos Flesher and just about everyone else at Little Heaven. It is an immensely powerful entity, is it not?”

Neither Minerva nor Micah would dispute it.

“So why does it live in that rock?” Eb went on. “Why feed—is that what it does? Feed? Let’s assume so. Why not set up shop someplace where the pickings are more plentiful?”

Micah had thought about this, too. Perhaps the thing was not so insatiable as Ebenezer suspected. Perhaps it was like a snake. It ate plentifully, dining on the sweetest flesh: on children, as it seemed to have more of an appetite for them than the older, stringier members of our species. Though perhaps it wasn’t about the quality of our meat, lamb versus mutton—it was the quality of a child’s spirit, its virginal state, versus the corrupted and corroded worldview of an adult. Once it had eaten, it had no need to seek prey again for possibly decades—so long as it had a host like Augustus Preston or Amos Flesher, something to suck on slowly like an after-dinner mint. If it were to migrate to some more populated place, it might be found out. This thing had been plying its trade a long time, and this was its happy hunting ground.