Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Micah said, “You look okay. Apart from the drink.”

“And the noose,” said Ebenezer.

She tried to smile. “I’m used up. And I’m… I’m scared, Shug.”

“Well. So am I.”

She looked up. Micah was placidly regarding her.

“You?”

He nodded. “Not so much for myself, but yes, I am scared.”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I honestly might not be any use to you.”

“Cry me a river,” Ebenezer said.

“What was that?” Minerva said icily.

“Are you the only one who harbors fear in your heart?” Eb mordantly chuckled. “I am as broken as ever I’ve been. My own shadow on the wall scares me most nights.”

“So go,” Minny said. “Who’s stopping you?”

Ebenezer shook his head. “I pegged you as many things, my dear. But never once did I peg you for a coward.”

Minerva cut her eyes at him. He met her gaze. A challenge. She dropped her head and waved a dismissive hand.

“Sell it walking.” She flipped a switch inside her mind, her eyes going hard. “Take your crazy somewhere else.”

Micah stood. Minerva thought he might try to press her, but that had never been his way. They would go without her. And die wretchedly in the dark. But they would go. Ebenezer might quit when the madness got too much—and it would, as sure as breathing—but Micah would wade right in until it stole everything he had to give.

“There a bar around here?” Micah said.

“There’s one jutting off the ass end of this motel,” she told him.

“I think he meant one where the cockroaches don’t have name tags,” said Ebenezer.

“It will do,” said Micah.

She waved her hand again. “Go on, then. Scat.”

They did. The door shut behind them. She sat in the shadow of the noose. She ran her hand over her freshly shorn scalp. She always liked to get a buzz cut before trying to snip her mortal cord. She had this weird fear that some shitty, unscrupulous undertaker would sell her hair to a wig shop. Stupid, the things people worry about. She shut her eyes—but something leapt up, a long-forgotten shape that shone a delirious bone white in the darkness behind her eyelids. She jolted, opening them.

“I can’t. Christ. I can’t do it again.”

She dropped a dime in the box bolted onto the TV. It bought her a couple minutes of flickery black and white. She needed the distraction. Micah and Ebenezer were in the bar now, waiting for her to change her mind. She had to hold out. One drink and they would surely leave.

She tuned in to an episode of The Waltons . Usually this kind of saccharine shit made her teeth ache, but right now it was just what the doctor ordered.

“Good night, John-Boy, you pig-fucking little bastard,” she muttered.

A commercial came on.

“ What’s inside this little blue egg that keeps Barbara Eden looking slim and trim? ” asked the jovial announcer.

“Who gives a flying fuck,” Minerva said.

“ Oh, there’s only one answer to that—it’s L’eggs control-top panty hose! L’eggs slims and trims but doesn’t bind, so you get comfort and control! ”

The meter clicked. The screen blinked out. Minerva went to drop in another dime. She stopped. She swore she could see something in the smoky square of the dead TV. Something jesting and capering…

Human fears obeyed a hierarchy. Minerva had discovered that as a girl. She had never been as scared as on that sunny afternoon when her brother was taken by that snake. Her fear had held different layers: the helplessness, the heaving revulsion, the understanding that the world could yawn open at any time and take what was most precious. That afternoon—those few minutes within it, dominated by the sound of the snake’s mouth opening to ingest her still-breathing brother, so much like the stretching of a thousand wet rubber bands… Minerva never thought she would know a terror to rival it.

Her belief had stood until one night in Little Heaven, when she rounded the edge of the chapel to spy a boy sitting cross-legged in the moonlight. The darkness twitched all around him, moving with a trillion sightless eyes. The boy turned, knowing she was there though unable to see her. He smiled—so sweet, so innocent—with his eyes the color of smoke. He was holding something in his hands. Beyond him lay the feasting darkness of the woods. From behind the trees had come the sound of something consuming its prey… but not in any natural way.

Minerva sank down on the bed. It was there again. That old squirming fear creeping up her legs like gangrene. It got inside and ate you from within, squandered and reduced you until you were helpless to fight it. That kind of fear could ruin you—you and those around you, too, because you were no use to anyone with that dread lodged in your heart.

She sat for a few minutes, thinking. Was she seriously going to do it? Was she actually contemplating hurling herself back into that horror?

She was just a sack of skin. That was how she saw it. Hell, that’s all anyone was. She was a sack, and Micah was a sack, and Ebenezer—oh, he was definitely a sack. Billions of sacks colliding with one another every goddamn day. Sometimes two of them collided and something good came of it. Sometimes two or three or more collided and something awful happened. But that’s all life was—sacks of skin bumbling around, bumping into their fellow sacks, and stuff happening.

But she had to admit that Micah Shughrue, ole Shug, he was about the best sack of skin she’d ever bumped into. That said, she owed them nothing. Not the Englishman, for damn sure. Not even Micah. The debts still due were their own.

But then, what else did she have? What was her life? She killed people. She was denied the mercy of death. She woke up screaming more nights than not. She owed, and she was paying. Maybe it was finally time to follow that line back. Pay a visit to her old benefactor. Renegotiate their deal.

Isn’t my life hell anyway? Minerva thought. Isn’t that why I want to die?

There are worse hells than this , a voice whispered softly in her ear.

SHE FOUND THEMin the bar.

“I’ll come.”

Micah said, “Okay.”

“Don’t go getting all dewy-eye on me, Shug.”

Micah said, “Okay.”

AFTER THE SEABORN APPLETONmatter had concluded to Micah’s satisfaction—ultimately Shughrue had allowed Appleton to continue to suck breath, though it’s possible Appleton would have preferred death to the state he was left in—the three outlaws hid out on a farm on the outskirts of Angel Fire, a town in Colfax County, New Mexico.

In later generations, it would be difficult for two men and one woman with a history of illegalities to disappear quite so easily. But in the sixties, when records were written out in longhand and transferred to carbons and put in files that went into filing cabinets in dank basements infested by mice and mold, it was still a possibility. You could live off the grid, in unmapped places, sheltered from the long arm of the law. If you kept to yourself and paid in cash and didn’t get sick and drove at the speed limit, well, there was a chance you might never run afoul of those government agencies whose job was to track the movements and intents of its citizenry. You could just… vanish.

Micah had done some work for the farm’s owner back when the man had made his living by rawer means. There was a mutual respect and fealty between them. Johnny Law did not come searching for them. What had they really done, anyway? Tried to kill one another, without success, then ganged up to mutilate a drug dealer. The law had more pressing matters to address.