Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

He hesitated, unsure.

“Nate,” she said, “ I believe you.”

Relief washed over him. “Okay,” he said. “But I hope I don’t see anything.”

“Me, too.”

She returned to the glassworks. A frigid wind screamed around the edge of the shed and brought up goose pimples on Nate’s calves.

THE PRESTON SCHOOL FOR BOYS.

These five words were stamped on a strip of tin that arched over the entry path. But the wooden poles that had once held the sign aloft had rotted; the sign hung from the second pole on a rusted spike, the tin eaten through by rain and wind.

The path itself was just a ghost, two narrow strips grown over with weeds and bracken. A set of pitted concrete steps—only two of them, like a staircase that had been abandoned in midbuild—sat beside the path, just past the sign. These were wagon step-downs: a driver would pull a horse-drawn cart beside them to allow passengers to dismount without spraining an ankle.

“ Greeeen Acres is the place to be ,” Minerva sang. “ Faaaarm livin’ is the life for me. ” Off a look from Micah: “What, you don’t watch TV? What the hell do you do at night, Shug—stare at the hands on the clock?”

They walked toward the buildings. Minerva tried to whistle the Green Acres theme—anything to drive the stony silence away—but a scouring wind wicked the spit off her lips.

“Old private school, you figure?” she said. “Rich folk sending their Chads and Coopers and Athertons out to the sticks to put some bark on their satiny skin?”

Micah shook his head. “Reform school. Juvenile delinquents.”

“So you’ve heard about this place?”

“No. Just ones like it.”

The Preston School for Boys appeared to be made up of three primary buildings. Two large outbuildings and one house. They approached the larger of the outbuildings. Its door hung cockeyed on rotted hinges. Inside were two rows of bunk beds, five to a side, enough to sleep twenty kids. Ashen light filtered through the dirt-caked windows. The bed frames were remarkably well preserved. The mattresses had a few rips and tears where the horsehair was leaking out. Shingles had blown free of the roof in spots, creating gaps where the sun had bleached the floorboards. But overall, there was an oddly hermetic, museum-quality air to the interior.

Words had been scratched into the far wall. Each letter gouged into the wood—frenzied-looking strokes with a penknife or other sharp object.

Why is 6 afraid of 7?

789! 789!

“A riddle,” Micah said. “Six is afraid of seven because seven ate nine.”

They walked between the bunks. Old footlockers with cracked leather hasps lay at the foot of each bunk. Minerva opened one. Inside sat a tin toy. A stork wearing a top hat. When she wound a key on the stork’s back, the thing chittered to life. First it tipped its hat. Then its long beak opened to reveal a tiny swaddled infant lying on its tongue. Most of the baby’s face was eaten away by rust. The key revolved. The stork’s beak snapped shut on the baby. The gears wound down.

Minerva turned the toy over. Stamped on its bottom was: GELY TOYS 1870. A ripple of discomfort raced up her spine. She put it back in the footlocker, disliking the feel of the metal on her fingertips: warm and greasy, as if it had just recently sat in a child’s clammy hands.

Micah inspected some of the other footlockers. More than a few were empty. Those that weren’t held scant possessions: moldering Bibles, crucifixes, a glass jar half full of marbles, a doll made of braided hair. Items the boys who’d once slept in these beds had been allowed to bring, or else had smuggled in.

Minerva said, “How many boys were here, do you figure?”

“Hard to know,” said Micah. “Ten. A dozen.”

“It’s a long way from anywhere.”

“Better than jail.”

“If you say so.”

They went back outside. The land past the sleeping quarters lay flat in the afternoon sun. A metal plow, the kind hauled by oxen, stood not far from a boarded-over well. Fifty yards from the well, Minerva sighted two squat metal boxes in a nest of weeds. They weren’t much bigger than coffins. They had also rusted through in spots, though the metal was quite thick.

“What the hell are those?”

Minerva walked across the field until she drew near to the boxes. Each had a door on the side. She lifted the latch, knelt, and opened one. Micah followed her. He watched, saying nothing. Minerva caught the smell of rain-rinsed steel and something else, more primal, still traceable after all these years. She got down on her hands and knees and stuck her head and shoulders inside one box. Words had been scratched on the metal. Fanatical and somehow helpless ones, etched with sharp field rocks.

HELP and OUT and SORRY and PLEASE .

A lot of PLEASE s.

All that, plus two alternating words, scratched with terrible precision on the lower left side.

FLESH. BEAST. FLESH. BEAST. FLESH. BEAST.

She squirmed out of the horrible box. Jesus, that couldn’t possibly be legal. But this place was in the middle of nowhere. Who would have been watching?

Micah took in her shocked pallor. “It was a different time,” he said.

“Bullshit,” Minerva spat back, trembling with rage. “Basic humanity is timeless, isn’t it? These were boys .”

They carried on to the other large building, which turned out to be the mess. Like the sleeping quarters, it was intact. The chairs and tables, immaculate. Jars of preserves lined the kitchen cupboards. The seals had burst and many jars had broken, but this had happened so long ago that the stink was gone. The food, whatever it had been, was no more than a crusted stain. No animals had been at the jars. No insects, even. The damage was simply the result of the decades passing by.

“Bizarre,” Minerva said. “It’s as if this whole place has been…”

“Curated,” said Micah.

They exited the mess and made their way toward the house. The front of the house, the porch and veranda, was black from fire. It had not engulfed the entire structure, but it had blown out the front windows and charred the veranda roof, the wooden ribs of which sagged down in fire-thinned quills. Minerva noted the effigy of a rocking chair heat-welded to the porch. She imagined the owner of this house sitting on that rocker in the high heat of a summer afternoon, watching his young charges till the fields. From this distance, he would have heard the boys screaming in the hot boxes, too.

The porch creaked ominously but bore their weight. They walked through the gutted door frame into the house. The fire had made no inroads here. A thick layer of dust had settled over everything. The furniture was still in good enough shape to fetch a fair sum at an antiques show. There wasn’t much of it, however, as the house’s occupant seemed to prefer a spartan living style.

A rack of rifles lined a cabinet in the front room. Micah swung the glass front open and inspected them.

“Civil War era,” he said. “That is a Lindsay model. A Whitworth, there. These guns are over a hundred years old.”

They went upstairs. The walls were papered with a pattern of cabbage roses faded to dim blots. The front bedroom overlooked the mess and sleeping quarters. A pair of field binoculars rested on a tripod before the window. Minerva peered through them. She could see across the fields to the woods fringing the basin that they had climbed earlier.

The room had a desk. The home’s sole photo sat upon it. A sepia shot of a man whose large round head sat atop a thick neck. A walrus mustache. Fat fleshy lips. He stared forward with a certain imperiousness, as if challenging the viewer to contradict his view of the world.