Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

“Did you see anything, Reggie?” Ellen asked.

Reggie paused, then shook his head. “I was asleep like all of you. Didn’t see a thing.” He swallowed and said, “We need the Reverend’s guidance. He will tell us—”

“We don’t need shit from him,” the skinny woman spat.

Nate glared at his father.

I hate you.

The fury of Nate’s thought zipped through the air and slammed into his father. Nate saw his dad flinch from the psychic pain of it. He went back through the swinging door, leaving Nate in the kitchen.

THE REVEREND AWOKEin the chapel covered in blood.

He had been biting his hands while he slept. He’d worried divots of flesh out of his palms and wrists and woke up sucking on his own blood.

Amos was sleeping in the chapel sacristy, in the credenza. He felt safe in there, curled into a ball with the doors shut. He let his hatred collect into a hard little ball, too, nursing it on his own black bile.

His flock had abandoned him. All but a few—the stupidest and most useless ones. After all he had done for them! The bastards! Cunts! He imagined stealing into the mess hall and finding the largest knife to slit all of their Iscariot throats. Or, if not all of them, then those who had instigated the insurrection. He pictured grabbing Otis Langtree’s hair, drawing the skin of his neck taut, and sawing through his treacherous windpipe. Reaching into Nell Conkwright’s mouth, gripping her eelish tongue, slicing it out at the root, and laughing as the blood splashed his chest. Pinning Charlie Fairweather down and carefully slitting his eyeballs, pushing on them until the gooey centers burst through the slit like peeled grapes—

Yes! Nothing would be finer. But of course, he could not. He was physically weak, always had been. His gift was to make people do his bidding through guile and honeyed words and his command of the Good Book… or it had been until now. He was powerless, a declawed kitten. His most trusted lieutenants had instigated a rebellion against him. It made him boil with rage. And now, if his understanding of the situation was correct, it was too late to kill them himself. Langtree and Fairweather were dead. He’d watched the scene out of his window—the one-eyed bastard returning alone, then his assault at the hands of Maude Redhill. Good. It was perfectly fine that those traitorous scum were dead. His only sadness was that he couldn’t have watched the life drain out of them personally.

He heard something out in the chapel.

Amos crawled out of the credenza. His blood sang and his skin prickled all over. He walked out of the sacristy into the chapel proper. The Voice beckoned him.

He walked between the pews. Musical notes came from all around him, but from inside of him, too. Something was there in the chapel with him. But the doors and windows were locked. It was Christ’s sanctuary. Yet it was here. A presence. Something with a massive weight and gravity that sucked at the deepest part of him. His soul, just maybe.

“Hello?” he said childishly.

Up here.

His gaze ascended. Something lurked in the apse, in the shadows above the crucified Christ. It seethed in that arched vault, a dark mass that shifted and breathed and chittered.

“My God…”

Amos Flesher’s heart fluttered. His insides went to water.

Oh no , the thing spoke in his mind. Not God, child.

Of course not. It never had been. That understanding arrived with a thunderclap. What he was hearing now was the same Voice he had followed to this spot all those months ago. Not the voice of God, but a different one—a Voice of chaos and blood. A Voice that hummed like flies sometimes; other times it sounded like a worm of limitless length coiling around and around its own infinite body. And… Amos was fine with that. Yes, he was. The fact rested easily in his head. A gear locked in place, spinning contentedly on its axis.

The thing in the rafters of the ruined, befouled chapel gibbered and giggled. Amos saw only a hint of its true shape. It was enough. It spoke to him in a familiar voice.

“ You have been fiddling with your dirty stick, haven’t you? ”

Amos was unsurprised to find he had an erection. It tented the satiny material of his pajamas. Idly, he reached under the waistband and began to pull on his cock. It felt nice to milk it like an itsy-bitsy udder.

“Yes,” he said stupidly.

“ Fiddling and fiddling and fiddling…, ” the thing crooned.

Amos pulled with greater force. He was going to make a mess. Back at the orphanage, he hated doing that; he would tease himself to the point of release, then grip it and squeeze so his seed wouldn’t spill out, so hard that blood vessels burst on the head of his penis. But he wasn’t worried about that now. He pulled on it real hard, just like the soft-brain Finn used to do to his own thick mongoloid dick. Amos yanked so forcefully that the skin ripped down the shaft, though it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, it felt wonderful. The air touched the ripped flesh with a pleasant tingle. He wasn’t thinking of anything remotely sexual; instead, he envisioned that his body had turned into an enormous mouth with teeth the size of bricks, snapping and chattering around inside the locked orphanage, chasing screaming kids and grinding them up, breaking their bones and pulping their soft flesh and cracking their skulls between his mammoth molars like walnuts and—

“What do you want?” he asked, feverishly.

“ You know what ,” Sister Muriel said.

And Amos did know. The Voice wanted what it had always wanted. What it had brought Amos out here for. The sweetest fruit of Little Heaven.

Amos began to laugh. It started out as effervescent titters but soon became throaty, then booming. It was not entirely sane, that laughter, but then, Little Heaven was no longer a sane place.

Amos wanted to obey the Voice. More than he’d ever wanted to follow the tenets of God. The Creator was a stodgy old bore. God stifled the true nature of man. The Voice spoke directly to that nature and asked that Amos do nothing more than give vent to the brutality that had long lurked at his core.

“ Give it to me ,” Sister Muriel—or the thing that was speaking in her voice—called down to him. “ Give me what I want and I’ll give you what you need… ”

But as Amos was a physical weakling and at heart a coward, he would have to be crafty. Well, crafty he could be. A plan was already flying together in his head, the pieces slotting flush.

“Yes.” His voice floated up into the poisoned chapel as Christ stared down impassively from His cross. “ Yes. ”

EBENEZER WAS UP AT DAWN,heading out of the mess hall and across the square. Micah called after him, but Eb didn’t bother to acknowledge his hail.

Eb stopped at a shed and grabbed a red toolbox. The box rattled against his thigh as he strode across the compound to the front gates. The sun was rising over the trees to lighten the woods. A few hollow-eyed Heavenites stood watch.

“Good morning, chappies,” he said to them. “Open up, daylight’s wasting.”

He was tired of these cornpone, Bible-bashing troglodyte shitbirds. They could go eat a bucket of elephant testicles, for all he cared. A big ole pailful, as these buffoons might say. Hyuk, hyuk. Crass, yes, but he had reached the end of his tether. If he was going to die, so be it. But not among these ingrate yokels, who would drag his soul into some hillbilly purgatory, where he’d be forced to listen to washboard-and-jug band jamborees for all eternity. Hell would be preferable.

When the morons didn’t move, Eb lifted the latch himself and pushed the gate open. He was whistling a Cockney tune. His hair had gone frizzy and was tangled up with shreds of dead leaves and maple keys—he would kill, quite literally kill , for a hot shower and a bottle of Lustre-Creme shampoo. Sunlight washed the access road, touching the body of Charlie Fairweather, who lay three hundred yards off. Well, half of Charlie, by the looks of it. Poor bastard.