Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

He’s back.

Eli Rathbone. Nate saw him. Nate knew it was Eli, even though he didn’t look much like his old self. Eli didn’t really look human anymore.

The bold strokes were still there, sure. Eli had two arms, two legs. But everything else was off . That was one of his mom’s pet words. The old man who sat in the public park watching kids play with hungry eyes was off . The neighborhood boy who used to walk down the sidewalk after a rainstorm eating every wriggling worm he could find was off . You know off when you see it , his mom used to say.

Eli Rathbone was naked, his skin white as the chalk dust they spread on the base paths at the ball diamond. He radiated a sick glow, like those deep-sea fish whose bodies produce their own light. He was so skinny now that Nate could see each of his ribs, even the short one at the bottom. His head was just a skull covered in onionskin. His arms were elongated, the arms of an orangutan. He did not seem to walk so much as float—

He ghosted across the compound under the sputtering light of the security lamps. Shadows pooled under his feet—shadows that seemed to bristle with a powerful intensity, like a collection of tiny individual shadows all huddled together.

That flute music zephyred through the air. Each note bristled with an intensity that quilled the hairs on Nate’s neck. He wished he hadn’t woken up. A helplessness rose up in him, this sense that he and everyone else in Little Heaven had been tricked. Though he could not articulate it, he felt the same way an animal in a snare must feel as the trapper’s footsteps approached through the glen.

Eli’s head swiveled. His eyes pinned Nate. Eli’s eyes were black as tar. Nate felt totally naked, as if his body had been touched with a powerful spotlight. Eli smiled. His teeth were all gone. His skin sagged. It was the smile of a million-year-old infant.

Eli passed out of sight beyond the edge of the bunkhouse that belonged to the Rasmussen family. John and Anna and their daughter, Elsa, who had been nice to Nate when he first showed up. That ended when she started to play the games dreamed up by Eli and the Redhill brothers. All the children had slowly given themselves over to cruelty. It was like watching a sickness spread. And now everyone was infected.

He stood at the window for a span of pulseless seconds. Then he went to his father’s bed.

“Dad,” he said. “Get up.”

He shook his father. His dad’s eyes stayed closed, a clenched expression fixed on his face.

“Dad, come on, please .”

His father mumbled and rolled over. Nate returned to the window. A squalid darkness overhung Little Heaven. Nothing moved. Not a single insect buzzed around the exterior lamps. Then—

They came around the edge of the Rasmussens’ bunkhouse.

Eli Rathbone came first, followed by Elsa Rasmussen. Then the Redhill boys, Elton and Billy. Linked hand to hand to hand. Elsa wore pajamas with a pattern of umbrellas. Billy and Elton only wore their underwear, their undeveloped chests pocked in gooseflesh. They did not walk so much as skip, as if they were playing some school-yard game.

One-two, skip to my Lou—skip to my Lou, my darlin’…

They passed under the spotlight. They weren’t just holding hands—their skin was melted together like sticks of wax heated with a Zippo, then pressed together. An ugly mess of flesh welded into a distended knot. They skipped along, Eli leading, toward a spot in the fence where the darkness collected in a narrow slit.

As one, their heads swiveled in perfect unison to Nate. His groin went tight, then seemed to splinter apart, little terror-spiders scuttling up and down through his body, turning his knees to jelly and shooting pins and needles down his fingertips.

Dreamily, in a state of near-paralyzing horror, Nate backed away from the window. He went to his father again.

“Dad!” he said, finding his voice. “Wake up! Wake up! ”

Nate’s fingers clawed into his father’s neck. He shook him as hard as he could. He would sink his teeth into his father’s shoulder next—anything to rouse him.

“Wuzza?” his father said, his voice thick with sleep.

“Get up! GET UP! ”

Reggie sat up. The fear in Nate’s voice must have penetrated his fogged brain.

“What, Nate?”

“Come look,” he said, hauling on his father’s arm. “Please. Quick. ”

“Nate, what is the matter with you?”

His father gazed at Nate with a look of confused apathy. His father had never been the most independent thinker—after his near-death experience, he’d become fond of phrases like The Lord’s will governs all things —but now he too often wore this deeply bewildered expression. It made Nate angry: his father had checked his brain at the gates of Little Heaven, which left Nate to make the grown-up decisions.

“Get UP!”

Obediently, Nate’s father followed him to the window. Eli and the others were almost out of sight as they skipped into the widening dark.

“Look!” Nate said, pointing.

His father followed Nate’s finger. Then his eyes did a funny thing. They went kind of soapy and retracted into their sockets like a turtle’s head tucking into its shell.

“Look at what?”

His voice seemed to come from the corner of the bunkhouse instead of his mouth. Nate gazed at him with a mixture of shock and disbelief.

“That’s Eli, Dad. Eli and Elsa Rasmussen and the Redhills, Elton and Billy. Can’t you see them, Dad? Right there?”

His father laughed—the laugh of a person desperately trying to find the humor in something that isn’t funny at all: a car crash or a public execution or a yellowy old body toppling out of its casket at a funeral.

“There’s nothing out there, Nate. You’re imagining things.”

His father wouldn’t look at him. Nate’s disbelief shaded into dread as a sinister realization began to dawn on him.

Either his father couldn’t actually see what Nate was seeing—some protective part of his brain had switched on, erasing the four gruesome children from his sight…

Or else—and this possibility was unspeakably worse—they were seeing the exact same thing, only his father was either too terrified or too cowardly to acknowledge it.

“Oh, Dad. Dad, please—”

“There’s nothing out there,” his father said robotically. “Not a thing.”

A profound desolation settled over Nate. He felt alone in a way he had never thought possible. He might as well be at the farthest reaches of the universe, at the point where all light died.

“Go back to bed, Nate. You’re being silly.”

His father turned—Nate got the sense of his dad’s body as a tightly coiled spring on the verge of snapping. He ruffled Nate’s hair. His fingers were hard and his nails too long; it was like being raked with sharp twigs. He lay down on his bed, his back to Nate.

Nate’s gaze fled to the window. Eli and the others had vanished. But he could see something in that rip of darkness. Just an outline.

A figure. Far too tall to be human. Long-legged and long-armed, with a giant cask belly. It capered and jigged with evident merriment. Smaller shapes, children-sized ones, danced around it. The discordant melody of the flute cut through the night.

The shape retreated. The smaller shapes followed it into the wooded dark.

AMOS FLESHER AWOKEto the sounds of his empire crumbling.

He was unceremoniously hauled out of a contented sleep—a dream where the world was covered with living black oil and he had the only rowboat. The Voice bubbled up from the oil, whispering and hissing…