Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

“It was some boys with their daddy’s axe,” ventured Eb. “Or a crazy fool who wanted to remember which tree he buried his jar of pennies under.”

There being no more logical explanation, they silently accepted Ebenezer’s reasoning. But the markings lingered in their minds. The violence with which those marks had been laid.

The path gradually rose. They wended over the foothills into the deeper passes. The land plateaued but never dipped. The trees thickened until the woods became impenetrable in some spots.

A deerfly settled on the nape of Ebenezer’s neck. It bit him and flew away before Eb could slap the bugger. Cocksucking bugs! he thought. Cocksucking trees! Cocksucking dirt! Ebenezer hated everything about the wilderness. Rather inconveniently, he had forgotten this fact. He was not built for this. His was a delicate constitution. As a boy, he’d been forever coming down with the sniffles. His humors were perpetually in arrears, as his grandmother used to say. His iron was probably low. He should shoot something that hopped or skulked through this godforsaken purgatory, put it out of its misery, and eat it raw. That would surely jack the life back into him.

But there was nothing to draw a bead on. He became aware of this quite suddenly. Where before there had been the industry of animals ferreting through the brush and birds wheeling in blue sky, now there was almost nothing. An odd serenity. Just the sound of their boots and Ebenezer’s own breath whistling in his ears.

We’re trapped with the Monster from Green Hell.

Ebenezer flinched visibly. Where had that thought come from? Then it dawned. Monster from Green Hell was a B-movie he had watched, along with The Brain From Planet Arous , at a creature-feature matinee many years ago. In… where had it been? Barstow, Illinois? Bar Harbor, Maine? He’d been on a job. He watched both films at a second-run movie house where the popcorn was stale and the floors sticky. The movie’s plot involved a rocket ship of mutant bees that crash-landed in an African jungle. The queen bee found sanctuary in a dormant volcano. Her progeny set about killing the local tribesmen. Then a delegation of blow-dried American scientists arrived. They tossed grenades into the volcano and triggered an eruption that incinerated the vile bugs. Fin.

The film was forgettable dreck—except there had been this one shot. Only a few frames of stock footage the cinematographer had jammed in to establish the setting. A panoramic view of the jungle. A riot of creeping vegetation and trees that had witnessed generations wither and die under the wide sweep of their limbs. A place where things never stopped growing, implacably and endlessly and insidiously so, pushing up through the ground and twining around whatever was closest to them, strangling it. A lunatic vista of inhospitable, brooding, vengeful green.

“ Yet his soul was mad ,” Ebenezer whispered. “ Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad. ”

Joseph Conrad. As a boy Ebenezer had been forced to study that malarial old moper. Those lines from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had leapt into his head unbidden. But Eb wasn’t in a jungle, was he? He was in a forest… and yet. The green was of a different shade. But it was everywhere.

“Did you say something?” Ellen asked him.

“Nothing of importance, my dear.”

THEY CRESTEDthe back of a ridge. The sun hung above the treetops.

“We’ve put eight or nine miles under us,” Minerva said. “We should find a place to camp for the night.”

They made their way across the ridge, scanning for a sheltered spot. The daylight was guttering, and they still had to pitch their tents and gather firewood. Minerva saw the Englishman staggering toward her, cursing. She did not want him to collapse—he might fall down the steep slope and break his loathsome neck, robbing her of the opportunity to slit it later on and dance a happy jig in his fountaining blood like a child skipping around an opened fire hydrant. She was half considering retreating to help him, when her thoughts were derailed by something that sat high up in a tree.

She stopped short. Ellen, who had been following tight on her heels, slammed into her back.

“What’s the—?”

Minerva heard Ellen’s breath escape in a whinny. She must have seen it, too. When Micah and Eb caught up, they also saw it.

It was seventy feet up, near the top of a ponderosa pine that had shed most of its needles. Dangling at the end of a branch. It wasn’t that big. It could have been many things. Twilight prevented accurate identification.

It seemed to have been skinned, whatever it was. It glimmered wetly. If it was a body, it could only be that of a small woodland animal. A rabbit, a kit fox. It hung from the branch on a thin strip of something-or-other like a Christmas ornament suspended on a line of filament. What predator would do that? Steal the skin of its prey and hang the body way up there?

The wind spun it in a slow circle. Spinning, spinning. Rags of flesh swayed from its limbs, as though it had perished thrashing and shrieking. The longer a person gazed at it, the more familiar its outline became…

“Let’s go,” Micah said.

THEY CAME UPONa tiny meadow carved from the trees and hunkered down. It was too dark to hike any farther.

The tents were made of heavy canvas. The poles were packed in eight-inch sections that had to be slotted together. They snapped on their flashlights and got to work. It took the women twenty minutes to set theirs up. The men muttered and griped as they struggled with their own.

“I’ll sleep outside!” Eb yelled, hurling a pole into the trees. “Bugger it all! I’ll sleep outside like a dog!”

Ellen helped the men get their tent up. She worked quickly but deftly, shooing the men aside so she could work unencumbered.

“A million thank-yous.” Ebenezer offered a bow. “I am afraid I’m all thumbs, my dear.”

Ellen curtsied. “Think nothing of it.”

Their exchanges were exaggeratedly comical—a distraction from the dread they had felt earlier while watching that small thing spin at the top of the tree.

They gathered wood and soon had a fire. The forest closed in, isolating them in that trembling pocket of firelight. Minerva pulled a Hebrew National salami from her pack; she cut it with her pocketknife and ate the thick wedges. Ebenezer drank his warm Yoo-hoos and stared at the can of beans he had brought.

“A can opener,” he said. “Ebenezer, you horse’s ass.”

Micah said, “Give it here.” He stabbed the lid with his dirk knife and levered it open.

“I am not built for such rough living,” Eb said, accepting the can back.

Knots popped in the fire. Minerva produced a flask and drank from it. She passed it to Ellen, who took a nip.

“Is it even legal?” Minerva asked. “An isolated society way out here? No laws, nobody to answer to?”

“They’re adults, is how you have to look at it,” said Ellen, passing the flask back. “It’s their right. Nobody’s forcing them.”

“Unless they’ve been brainwashed,” said Minerva.

“Yeah, unless. It’s not that uncommon,” Ellen said. “You’ve got little, what, enclaves like this all over the country. Utah, Montana, California. I went to the library and looked into it. It’s not that the authorities don’t know where they are; it’s that they don’t give a rat’s ass.”

Minny said, “But you got kids there, too.”

Ellen nodded. She had thought about that part of it quite a lot. It was—apart from her nephew’s general safety—why Ellen felt compelled to make arrangements with Micah. Nate had no choice but to go with his dad. And if Reggie wanted to devote himself to God in some remote encampment, okay. But Nate was being forced down a line, was how Ellen saw it. He was being pushed, bullied for all she knew, to accept this new life. That didn’t sit well with her. If he chose to walk that same line as an adult, fine. But to have that crucial element of choice taken away just because he was too young to make up his own mind seemed totally unfair.