Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Even worse than its mouth were its eyes. Two chunks of coal screwed into its head. The moonlight reflected off them in terrible ways, showing their broiling inner cores—Petty swore she could see things squirming behind its eyes like leeches in a jam jar.

It moved at a swift clip without effort. Its legs hurdled logs and snarled deadfalls in great, unhurried strides. She was carried along with it, her hand swallowed in its own. Her feet were still bare and she wore nothing but her nightdress, but she wasn’t cold or sore, even though they had covered many miles. Her feet rarely touched the earth—she seemed to ghost along it on a ribbon of air.

The Long Walker. That was what she would call this thing. It was her habit to name everything: her dolls, Jenny and Josephine; her wooden trains, Honey and Tugger and Pip; even the little brown mouse that lived in a hole in the kitchen, Mr. Squeaks.

She had been with the Long Walker for… Petty could not say how long. Her mind was foggy like it was after the doctor took out her tonsils. Time didn’t seem important. She could tell some hours had passed, maybe even a day. She was thirsty.

Soon, my dear. We both have thirsts to slake.

She had not uttered a word. Could this thing read her thoughts? It must have. It had slid into her head somehow. This worried her, but what could she do about it?

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Your father owes my father , the Long Walker thought-spoke in her mind.

The trees petered out. They came to an empty field. An encampment of some kind was set up not far away. Petty could see lights winking—brightly colored ones, blinking and circling…

They skimmed across the grass. A traveling carnival came into view. Shaky old rides, a midway, caravans where the workers slept. They circled the carnival’s perimeter where the light was weak, a pair of wolves scoping things out. They passed a caravan; Petty caught a snatch of a familiar jingle playing on a transistor radio hanging from its open window on a strap:

“ We’re gonna make a… hot cereal lover outta you! With ready-to-serve Quaker Oatmeal—you did it! ”

Cars were parked on a strip of beaten earth not far from the ticket taker’s booth. There were Monte Carlos and Dodges and pickup trucks with bales of hay in their beds. Beyond the cars Petty saw a string of shotgun shacks lining a paved road; they must be near one of the little towns ringing her home, places with names like Mescalero and Pecos and Elephant Butte. Elephant Butte attracts flies , her mother used to joke, even though it was pronounced beaut , not butt . Petty was sure the people of Elephant Butte were nice—people generally were around here: they worked and scraped their knuckles raw and drank too much and prayed away their sins every Sunday at church.

They skirted the midway, where grizzled-looking hucksters called out “One play, one win!” and “Test your luck for half a buck!” Rain dripped from the awnings of the ring toss and whack-a-mole booths. The Long Walker pulled her toward a striped tent. Light spilled from under its canopy and shone through eyelets where no ropes had been strung. They stopped a ways from the open flaps at the back, getting a view of its insides. Thirty or forty people were seated on folding chairs, facing away from Petty. Most of them were dressed simply, in sun-bleached frocks or overalls. A lot of the men had pipe holsters threaded through their hand-tooled leather belts, with their smoking pipes looped through them.

Everyone was focused on the man who stood on a raised stage in front. A preacher. It was not uncommon to find lay preachers peddling old-time religion from town to town around here—some people just couldn’t get enough. If there was a midweek opportunity for a top-up, they jumped at it. Strange to find a preacher at a carnival, but maybe some of these folk felt the urge to atone after too much cotton candy and spins on the Tilt-A-Whirl.

The preacher was tall and bony and what Petty’s mom would have called onion-eyed—meaning they bulged from his sockets like pearl onions—but he spoke with great conviction.

“…and many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and never-ending contempt!” he thundered as he strode across the stage. “ Hell! That’s right, that eternal place of damnation where you will go if you are not right with God when you perish. That’s right—Hell is a real place! And you will be sent there, sure as shooting, if you do not obey the Lord’s commandments!”

The congregants swayed in their seats. Rain pattered on the tent and dripped to the earth in ragged streamers.

“What of God’s promise of eternal life? There are conditions of that promise! Whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life , the Good Book says. So we must believe in Him. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up! ” The preacher stabbed an accusing finger at his audience. “My question to you, my good Christian neighbors, is this: Are you lifting the Son of man up as Moses lifted the serpent, or are you wandering around the wilderness?”

The Long Walker pulled a flute from the folds of its duster. It looked as if it was made out of a bone—perhaps a human one. It held it to its lips. The notes the flute made weren’t harmonious… but they were compelling. Petty turned toward the Long Walker instinctively, the same way a moth was drawn to a bug zapper.

The children in the tent turned, too. There were only five or six, but they all looked back. The adults didn’t take the slightest notice. A child seated in the back row—a girl of four or five—stood. She had been sitting on the aisle beside her mother. Nobody saw her walk out of the tent into the spitting rain.

The little girl strode right up to the Long Walker. A shy smile touched the edges of her heart-shaped mouth. But her eyes were huge with fear and her shoulders were set way back, as if every part of her was repulsed. The Long Walker whispered to her. Petty imagined how its voice would feel sliding into her ear—she pictured a thin, unbreakable icicle. The girl giggled. The Long Walker reached out and touched the girl on the tip of her upturned nose. She covered her mouth as if the Long Walker had said a dirty word. The flesh of her nose was beginning to blister already; after the ensuing chaos had ebbed, her mother would pale when she noticed the very tip of her daughter’s nose had gone the cracked gray of an old, unwrapped piece of liver forgotten in a freezer for months. The girl walked back into the tent.

“Now, what the Loooooord wants,” the preacher thundered on, “is for you to pay the tariff! The wages of sin, ladies and gents, is a high price indeed—”

“He touched me.”

The preacher stopped midsentence. The little girl’s voice cut through his sermon. She stood in the middle of the center aisle with her finger pointed at the holy man.

“The preacher. He touched me in my dirty spot.” Her finger dipped down and down until it pointed between her legs.

The congregation rumbled. The men—most of them with thick, sunburned necks and brush-cut hair—began to redden as their jaws went tense.

“I did no such—” A low moan escaped the preacher, who had turned pale as cottage cheese. “Oh God! Lies, lies!”

The Long Walker made a noise that could have been laughter. The men had begun to rise, their fists balling at their hips. The preacher was frantic, rung by all those blood-hungry faces.

“No! No, I… Where is this girl’s mother? Her father?” he said desperately. “They will tell you I did no such—”