Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

He was limping badly. Minerva slowed down to let him keep pace. “Do you think he’s dead?” she asked.

“After all that? I can’t see how it could be otherwise.” Ebenezer went silent a moment. “I hope so. I… I’ll pray it was so.”

Minerva nodded. “I don’t know if I can just leave him back there, though, Eb. Not without knowing for sure.”

Now it was Eb’s turn to nod. “Yes. We may have to go back. I cannot believe I’m saying that, but… Ellen might force the issue.”

“If she ever wakes up.”

“Yes. If.”

“I think I can die now,” Minerva said suddenly. “I feel it, you know? Of any old thing. A bloody nose. A bee sting.”

“So does that mean you want to die, milady?”

She turned her face up to the sky. The sun was uncommonly bright today.

“I’m gonna have to think about it.”

He clapped her on the back. “Think long and hard, my dear.”

PETTY STEPPED INTOthe bedroom.

Oh, my little girl was all Ellen could think. Oh, my baby, where have you gone?

Petty threw herself on the bed. She grabbed Ellen fiercely around her threadbare waist.

Gentle, baby girl. Your old mom’s not the woman she once was.

“Where have you been, Mom?” Petty asked.

“Where have I been?” Ellen croaked, noticing the dirtied hem of her daughter’s nightgown “Where have you been?”

They shared a look, one that said, I don’t know where I’ve been. But I’m so happy to be back.

Sherri and Nate stood with gobsmacked grins on their faces. Ellen’s gaze carried over to the window. Two figures were walking up the drive. She recognized them dimly—she had the sense of knowing them from long ago, as friends perhaps… although soldiers was the word that skated across her mind. These were people she had been in some terrible battle with, the exact nature of which she could no longer recall. The woman turned her face up to the sky to drink in the sunlight. She smiled and said something to the man, who patted her on the back hard enough to raise a plume of dust off her clothing.

“Put my arm around you, Pet,” she said. “I can’t lift it at the moment.”

Petty took her mother’s arm and draped it over her shoulder. It lay there like a bit of driftwood. It was okay. The feeling would come back eventually. Only one thing was missing.

Come back to me, Micah. For Christ’s sake, you come back.

It came to her then. A second premonition, but much worse this time. A hellish snapshot from her buried past, walled off behind an impenetrable barrier her mind had constructed to keep it from doing any further harm.

A black rock. A monolithic buzzing. The spiteful laughter of children. And a presence deep within that rock, cold and vile and relentless—

She recoiled. Then she began to cry. The sobs wracked her frame in painful waves, but she was unable to stop. She hadn’t cried with such ardency since she was a girl.

“What’s the matter, Mom?” she heard Pet say.

“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know .”

HELL IS A BOX.

Micah hung in emptiness. No top or bottom. All darkness.

He had surrendered all memory of his body. Eventually he would surrender everything else, too. His sanity, his humanity, even his name. This certainty rested easily within him.

Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands.

He tried to hang on to this, among a few other things. That image—a house made of dawn—and the shape of his wife’s mouth and the warmth of his daughter’s body pressed to his. But it was so goddamn hard. It was all fading, all failing, taking him with it.

What do we truly know of hell?

The thing nested contently within him. It… pulled. A slow, remorseless withdrawal. Sometimes he tried to fight back. Not physically, as he had irrevocably lost that control. But he would wall off his mind and think at it. Think good thoughts, affirming ones. The thing seemed to enjoy Micah’s feistiness. Time alone will split the strongest rock.

While his mind was still intact, Micah dwelled. Such was some men’s nature, as it was his. He reflected that this thing inside of him called out to evil men—or it called out to the evilness in men, which was essentially the same thing. It drew in those like Augustus Preston and Amos Flesher; perhaps over the course of its history, it had drawn dozens more. And now, it had drawn Micah into its web.

What did that mean? Was Micah as evil as those others had been? There was abundant evidence to support that argument. He had killed his fellow man without mercy and at times without cause. Old men, young men… yes, even children.

And yet.

And yet…

Dypaloh. House made of dawn. My father’s house has many rooms, each more splendorous than the last. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so—

It’s all so goddamn fragile. Your life and the thread you carry it on. And the more love you carry, the more stress you put on that thread, the better chance it will snap. But what choice do any of us have? You take on that love because to live without it is to exist as half a person. You give that love away because it is in you to give, not out of a desire for recompense. And you keep loving even when the world cracks open and reveals a black hole where all that love can get swallowed.

He had a sense of the thing inside of him now. It was distilled evil. Vast, unknowable. But it was elementally itself, as it had always been. The wasp stings. The jackal bites. That is the nature of those creatures, just as evil was this thing’s nature. Could anything be faulted for its nature?

I forgive you , he sometimes thought. This angered the thing to no end. It would shift within him, sending out needlefish of pain. But it was worth it.

Other times, he was able to cast his mind out of the black rock. Only for a few seconds before the thing caught him and reeled him back; it had become harder to do the more the thing fed upon him. In time, he would not be able to do it at all. But for now—if he marshaled all his will—he was still able to make that flight.

He pictured it as a jump. He coiled and sprang. His unconscious fled out of his body, up through the black rock to its peak. It was like swimming up through suffocating oil. He broke through into the clean sunshine, fresh air, birds trilling…

…and he could hear her.

Petty. His daughter. He could hear her—the wild, reckless laughter of youth. And whatever was left of him swelled to bursting.

Was evil a static commodity? He wondered this, too. Perhaps there was no more or less evil on earth now than there had ever been. It was like any other element. You could not manufacture any more of it than already existed. It got passed around from body to body, from death to new life. We all inherited a little bit of it. He had seen plenty of it. In the eyes of the men he’d fought beside in the war and in the eyes of the men he’d killed afterward… He’d seen it in his own eyes in the mirror. This being the case, perhaps it was not possible to erase evil from the lives of those you care for. All you could hope to do was divert it away from your loved ones, focusing it on another, equally profound evil. Failing that, you take it on yourself. Take that bullet, even if you have to take it for a hundred years.