Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Micah managed a smile. If this had an endgame feeling to it—and yes, it surely did—then why not have a few laughs before the curtain came down?

They reached the ledge. The darkness yawned. The rope ladder was still there, rolled up right where Micah had left it. The strangest thing. He remembered watching Ellen climb it fifteen years ago, the backs of her legs trembling in exertion. He recognized that some part of her must still be here, too.

Micah kicked the ladder over the edge; its rungs clattered against the stone as it unfurled. They climbed down. Ebenezer stopped halfway, his knuckles white on the rope, breathing in short doglike pants.

“I’m okay,” he said, to himself more than to the other two. “I’m not, actually, but that’s okay. That’s perfectly acceptable.”

They clustered in the basin facing the tunnel mouth. A sound emanated from it: a languorous exhale, as if the rock itself were breathing. Their faces were pale and sweat-stung in the lantern’s light.

Micah unshouldered his pack and put it on backward so that it hung from his chest. He crawled in first, holding the lantern. The tunnel was peppered with other holes, both small and large, holding teeming knots of darkness. Not a goddamned thing had changed. It was like crawling through an old dream that got progressively worse, narrowing to a perfect speck of darkness—the center of the nightmare.

The kids , Micah thought. We saved them. They would still be down here otherwise. That is the only change—they are not here. That is a good difference.

Ooooh, but wait , whispered a silky, devious voice in his ear. Some of them are still here, aren’t they?

The tunnel ended. One by one, they crawled out and stood within the great, dark vault. Micah set the lantern down and shrugged off his pack. He found his flashlight and swept it through the inky—

“No” was all he heard Minny say. One word, flatly stated. Her voice full of horror.

FIFTEEN YEARS.One-fifth of the average human lifespan, give or take. Yet time tended to behave oddly; it was never static, and people felt it differently depending on circumstance. For a child squirming in his desk on the last day of school, those final minutes before the bell rang could seem endless. When that same boy passed through adulthood to old age, those same minutes could pass without his knowing.

Fifteen years. For the Reverend Amos Flesher, they must have been an eternity.

He hung in a web of scintillating red ropes. His body had shrunken and seized up; his feet, which had once touched the ground, now dangled nearly a foot above it. His skin was as brown and dry and moistureless as a chunk of liver forgotten in the back of a freezer. He looked somehow wooden. His toes were curled and hooked upward in grisly curlicues, like awful genie shoes. His lips had thinned away to transparencies, his teeth brown and cracked. The fretwork of ropes creaked softly like the hull of an old Spanish galleon on the night sea.

Micah swept the flashlight past this horrible sight, moving left… His breath caught.

“Pet.”

His daughter stood behind the Reverend. Motionless, her face crawling with dread. Micah stepped toward her. The flashlight disclosed another shape behind her. Its fingers curled possessively on Petty’s shoulder, its upper body swathed in darkness.

The Big Thing. The Flute Player.

“Daddy, please .”

Micah could not tell if it was his daughter who had spoken or the thing behind her—it was an uncanny mimic, as he recalled. He held up his hands in surrender.

“She is all I want.”

“ Ass, gas, or grass ,” the Big Thing said in his daughter’s voice. “ Nobody rides for free, Daddy-o. ”

Micah nodded. Instinctively, he knew what to do. He pulled the knife from his pocket and unfolded the blade. He approached the Reverend. The slit in his back, the one Shughrue had carved into it all those years ago, was still wet, still… weeping. Gingerly, Micah touched the tip of the knife to its edge. A membrane burst, spilling noxious nectar down the Reverend’s flesh. The smell was that of a cracked-open coffin. Micah glanced at Amos’s face, wondering if any of this was registering; the Reverend’s eyelids were fissured with tiny dry cracks that seemed on the verge of ripping open, spilling his eyeballs down his cheeks.

Micah turned his attention back to the slit. He drew the blade across it, severing the protective sac. Something turned inside the wound, fat and slug-like; the sight was reminiscent of a cat stretching itself on a warm windowsill.

“Micah, what are you…?” Minerva said somewhere behind him.

The thing began to push itself out forcefully, with hard flexes and shoves. The Reverend shook helplessly; a second rip spread across his abdomen, and a desiccated loop burped through the split. His crotch—which was essentially sexless by now, just a flaccid free-hanging tube like a spent condom and a terribly distended and elongated sack with a pair of BBs rolling around inside—swayed lewdly, parodically. Micah stumbled back, the sight so overwhelming that his knees buckled, fear rushing through his brain as the thing muscled its way out with determined thrusts and the other thing, its helpmate, laughed the same way his daughter did at Scooby-Doo and Scrappy on the Saturday morning cartoons—

The thing slid out of the Reverend’s back and landed on the floor. At nearly the same instant, the ropes mooring the Reverend let go. The Reverend fell gracelessly and crumpled to the floor in a boneless heap…

Then Amos Flesher began to shriek.

His screams drilled through the air and ricocheted off the walls. They started out hoarsely, his vocal cords seized from disuse, but built to a lung-rupturing pitch. They were the gibbering bleats of a lunatic—a madness so profound it was all but unimaginable.

“No, Daddy!” he squealed as he bucked and writhed on the stone. “You don’t love me anymore you don’t love me never stop loving meeeeeee !”

Micah was overcome with pity. Amos Flesher was a devil—the cruelest man he had ever encountered, and he had run across many in his lifetime—but to see him there, naked and wizened as he shuddered on the floor with a kind of horrid, lascivious glee… Micah wanted to do something, if only to shut him up and end his misery. But he could not. He was completely paralyzed.

The Reverend’s hands—brown and sinewy and hooked into talons—danced in the air. His legs moved as if he was trying to climb an invisible staircase. He began to rip at his wasted body. His skin tore all too easily. Chunks of his chest and arms ripped free like enormous scabs. He screamed and laughed until he ran out of breath and began to gag helplessly as his hands rose to his face, scrabbling at his cheeks and nose and finally his eyes, which burst dryly, like spore bags, releasing splintered puffs of matter.

“Daddy!” he mewled, crawling blindly toward the thing that had lived inside of him for fifteen years, feeding on him in some terrible way, wrecking him in a manner no human should have to experience. “Pleeeeeaase, oh pleeeease, don’t leeeeave me, Daddy!”

He scrabbled toward the wet pink baby-thing, moaning and spluttering. The Big Thing left Petty’s side; it strode forward, and with quick, methodical ease, it stepped on the Reverend Amos Flesher’s skull. A sickening crunch. The Reverend’s reedlike legs jittered. Then they quit moving.

Micah waited, his breath whinnying out of him. When the Big Thing did not move, he took a wide berth around the squirming baby-thing and went to his daughter. The Big Thing knelt, fingering the remains of Flesher’s broken skull case. The Reverend’s brain was pale and dry, leeched of moisture, like some kind of cheap, crumbled cheese.