Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

“Where else?”

Eb dropped his head again. His body appeared to deflate. His breath came heavy, as a man’s does just before he’s about to heave up his guts.

“Bloody fucking hell. I thought we ended all that,” he rasped. “It almost killed us all, and it certainly wrecked the three of us going forward, but… I thought we put that to bed for good and all.”

Micah did not fault the Englishman his belief. But was the thing they encountered in the woods ringing Little Heaven—the real terror, lurking within the black rock… Could such a thing truly be mastered by the hand of man? Or had they shackled it for only a brief while—years for them, for itself the mere blink of an eye—and given it time to heal, to plot, and to nurse its rage?

“I need your help,” Micah said quietly. “I would never ask, except…”

Ebenezer did not stir for quite some time. When at last he looked up, his eyes were still bloodshot, but there was only a slight quaver in his gaze. “I’ll need to pack some things.”

Ebenezer got up. He went into the bedroom. He shut the door and closed his eyes. He didn’t want Micah to see the way he slept. His bed was a single mattress on the floor. One sheet, no pillow. Micah didn’t need to see Ebenezer’s crucifix collection, either. Dozens of them. On every wall. Hung from the ceiling on loops of fishing line. Ebenezer himself had drawn crude crosses with charcoal pencils, scratching them onto the walls between the nailed-up crucifixes. Even though he did not believe in God—even though the god he saw when he closed his eyes was a leering idiot—the crosses comforted him in some odd fashion.

Ebenezer tried to sleep during the day; he found it easier to surrender consciousness with sunlight streaming into the room. But he was a hair-trigger sleeper; the sound of an ant pissing on cotton batting was enough to wake him up these days. He hadn’t slept—really slept —in fifteen years.

At night, he paced the house and stared out at the street, or surveyed the empty fields from his kitchen window. In the deepest hours of night he saw, or believed he could see, undefined shapes cavorting where the night was thinnest—just beyond the glow of the streetlights, or at the edges of the moonlight where it played over the barren grassland.

Things waiting. Things watching. Hungering.

Sometimes at night, Ebenezer slipped into a fitful doze. His system would just crap out like an old radiator. Then the dreams would come. Not just the one where he saw God’s face. That one was bad enough. This other dream was even worse.

In that dream he was trapped beneath the earth in a place where no light ever shone. He had been there before. In that darkness—so absolute he felt it attaching to his skin, pulling the blood out of his veins and the very sight out of his eyes—he could hear things. Terrible things. Sucking sounds. And other, subtler tones made worse by how delicate they were. That of flesh being pulled apart, maybe… which is not a very loud noise at all, though one might think it ought to be. Rending flesh carries its own note, which sounds like no other—a little like silk sheets slit apart with a scalpel.

In the dream, he stood in that clotted darkness, surrounded by the moist sucking, ripping, and the high breathless inhales a person makes when ice water is poured down the back of their necks. Taken together, they were almost sexual. The ecstatic, groveling noises of sexual climax.

Wending through these sounds, riding an alternate sonic register, was a note composed of many tiny voices threaded together…

…and it sounded like the laughter of children.

Ebenezer stood in his room surrounded by flea market crucifixes and began to shake, his body wracked with uncontrollable shivers. He hugged himself and bit his lip until blood squirted. His knees went out, and he collapsed to the floor silently, not wanting Micah to come in and see him this way. He laid his head on the floor.

You have no choice , he told himself. You have to go. Pull yourself together, for the love of Christendom.

He got the shakes under control. He stood, jelly-legged. He wiped away the blood. It was all right to be scared. Any man would be.

He pushed the mattress aside and prized up two floorboards. He pulled up a familiar beechwood box.

“Hello again, ladies.”

His Mauser pistols. A few loose bullets rolled around in the bottom of the box. The guns would need oiling, and he would need more ammunition. A great deal of it.

He dressed in faded jeans and a white V-neck T-shirt. He packed a bag with underwear, socks, shirts, and some trousers. The pistols went in the bag, too.

He took a crucifix off the wall. A four-inch Jesus with a tarnished copper face was nailed to the crossbeams.

“In you go, sport,” Ebenezer said, slipping it into his bag.

He stepped into the hall and shut the door behind him. Micah was still in the chair right where Ebenezer had left him.

Micah said, “You coming, then?”

“You think I got all dressed up just to stay here?”

“You probably will not come back, Eb. Neither you or me.”

Eb nodded. “It is probable.”

“Well. Thanks.”

“Oh well. I’ve lived long enough.”

They went outside. Ebenezer left the front door wide open.

“Need to say your good-byes to anybody before we go?” said Micah.

Ebenezer shook his head. “My creditors can seek redress with my next of kin, if they can be found. Now, how did you get here?”

“Took the bus.”

“Ah. I don’t have a car.”

“We can rent one.”

“Not in this town we can’t.”

They walked down the street. Micah walked slowly to allow his limping companion to keep stride. The sunshine imparted a pleasant tickle on their skin. The piebald dog resumed its pursuit.

“We could steal a car,” said Ebenezer. “That could be fun.”

“Either way.”

Eb sighed. “I imagine we’re off to find Minerva?”

“Yes.”

“Do you imagine she’s expecting us?”

“Were you expecting me?”

“Yes.”

“Then yes.”

Eb sighed again. “I don’t imagine she’ll be terrifically pleased to see us.”

“Pleased or not, we are coming.”

MINERVA FIGUREDit was high time to try and hang herself again.

She couldn’t remember when or where the last time had been—the attempts all blended together after a while. Anyway, why not? She had no other plans for the afternoon.

Another town, another ratbag motel room. The Double Diamond Inn, this time. New Mexico was littered with shitholes just like it. The mattress was thirty years old and probably saturated with a thousand dreary cumshots milked from the nutsacks of basset-faced johns by one dead-eyed whore or another. And here Minny was, sitting on the mattress. Buoyed up on a cushion of grim, dried-up old sperm.

Minerva tended to get moody before a suicide attempt. It was tough to see the rosy side of life. But perhaps there had been happiness in this room, too. A young couple could have passed a night in this dump on their way to another city, a better life. Maybe their first child had been conceived in this very bed and had gone on to invent the floppy disk or star in an off-Broadway play or some shit. Who could say?

The noose was fashioned out of stout nautical rope. She had pulled a ceiling panel loose and knotted the rope around an exposed pipe. She sat on the bed, staring up at it.

She had a forty-ouncer of rye. Bathtub-grade shit, just slightly more pure than Sterno. She would drink as much as she could, then clamber up on the chair and stuff her head through the noose. Kick the chair away, la-di-da, carefree as a bird. Say good night, Gracie.