Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

“Breeding,” said Micah.

They moved past the olms, deeper into the cavern. The flashlight swept over something… Micah registered it the next instant and swung the beam back. A hair barrette. Dull pink. The sort of thing a girl wore. The little Rasmussen girl, for instance.

The cavern narrowed until they had to walk single file. Minerva grabbed ahold of Micah’s belt loop. The blackness pushed back at them, almost a physical presence; if he shut off the flashlight—or if the batteries suddenly died—Micah imagined it slipping over them, inside of them, sliding around their eyeballs and between their lips, a predatory darkness seeking something to feast upon. He stumbled and set a hand on the wall to steady himself. The rock was not cold to the touch, at least not this deep inside the monolith: it was warm and slick, like the flesh of a sleeping giant.

The floor dropped away five feet ahead; the flashlight beam picked up motes of dust swirling in a mammoth darkness.

“Hold up,” said Micah.

They had reached the lip of a precipice. There was just enough room to perch at its edge. Micah shone the light down. The drop was nearly straight. Micah guessed it was a thirty-foot fall. At the bottom was a basin with a ten-foot-wide base. He could make out the mouth of a tunnel down there; it was more cramped than the cavern they had already traversed—the tunnel looked to be about four feet in height, three feet in diameter. It must lead deeper inside the rock.

A rope ladder traveled down the face of the drop; the rope was sturdy but old, the wooden rungs worn smooth with age. Micah shone the light upward. The ceiling bellied a few feet above them. There was just the precipice, the drop, and the tunnel mouth below.

“Who would put a ladder here?” Minerva said.

Micah grunted. It wasn’t a question worth contemplating. The ladder was here. That was the only thing that mattered. He kicked a pebble over the edge and followed it with the flashlight. It bounced off the rocks at the bottom of the basin and skipped toward the mouth of the tunnel—

Micah’s breath hitched, then whistled out on a near-silent note.

Four sticks. Craggy and white as driftwood. Four sticks were latched around the top of the tunnel’s mouth. At least, that’s what they looked like on first blush. So much so that Micah’s mind tried to immediately dismiss them as such. Except for their placement. How would sticks get to such a place? How would they find themselves latched round a tunnel mouth so deep within this place? Maybe they were exposed roots—but if so, roots to what ? What tree or weed could grow down there? And how would those roots push themselves out of solid rock?

Then it dawned on him that those sticks were moving ever so slightly. They were vibrating minutely, in fact, the outermost stick lifting and coming down again on the rock. Tapping, almost…

…almost like a finger.

Four more sticks materialized close to that first bundle. They crept out of the darkness at the tunnel’s mouth and latched around its upper curvature. Micah stood frozen. The fingers were long and wiry like insulated electrical cables. Well, isn’t that odd? Dreamily, Micah wondered what they could be attached to. He tried to picture the wrists and arms, the body… Next, his brain went dark, his synapses dimming like a cityscape during a rolling blackout.

Then came the sounds. They traveled up from the tunnel below them. The laughter of children. A charmless sound, full of mocking malice.

“ Come. ”

A child’s voice. But not exactly. More the voice of a child who had lived in this sunless place for a minor eternity. A child whose eyes were yellow as a cat’s eyes and whose flesh has the look of old parchment. A wizened and corrupted thing whose throaty chuckling drifted up from the bowels of the earth.

“ Meat for the feast ,” the voice called.

The strain of terror that entered Micah’s heart at that moment was unlike any he’d ever felt—even worse than anything he’d experienced in Korea, though he had been scared an awful lot over there. But those were understandable fears. Fears about what war—and the machinations of his fellow man—could do to your body and mind. He was ripped back through time to a cold night in Korea when he’d been walking past the medic’s tent; the flap blew open in a high wind. He saw a young soldier—still a boy, really—lying on a makeshift bed. His arms and legs had been blown off. All that was left were these rags of flesh that swung and drooped from the stumps of his legs like thick moldering curtains. The boy wasn’t screaming. The shock put him beyond all that. Micah had glimpsed the surgeon’s eyes above his blood-spattered mask: they reflected a dull emptiness, as if he wasn’t seeing the patient in front of him. A single word drifted out of that open flap before the wind blew it shut again: Mommy. One of those men had called out for his mother—and Micah was almost positive that it hadn’t been the soldier’s voice.

The terror of war was a bodily one—the fear that you might die in the shit and muck or, worse, get blown apart and live and have to continue on in a horribly reduced capacity. But at least it was a known horror, and your enemy was clear. He shared your same skin.

But right now? Those fingers curled round the rock and the sound of that laughter… it was a rip in the everyday fabric. A glimpse in the roiling heart of something impossible to comprehend. Even those things in the woods were dangerous only to a point: they would rip you to shreds and make an end of you. Tear your guts out like they had done to poor Charlie and Otis, who were beyond suffering now.

“Shug?” Minerva said from someplace over the mountain and far away.

Micah’s eyes remained on those fingers. They tensed as if in preparation to propel the rest of its body forward the way a spider pushes itself from its hidey-hole: the legs coming first, spanning all around the hole, then the fat black nut of its body surging forth—

The laughter dried up… Then it returned even louder than before.

Minerva gripped his wrist. “ Please. ”

BE PENITENT. Be remorseful. Be the father they need.

Reverend Amos Flesher sat cross-legged on the chapel floor. A chapel built to his exact specifications and erected by his flock. For months, he had sermonized from its pulpit. His people had received his words with the lamblike docility he had entrenched in them and thus come to expect.

But now, their trust in him had been shaken. At first he had been angered by their treachery—his rage had been such that he’d pictured bashing their heads in until their skulls resembled broken, bloodied crockery… but then the Voice spoke, and he listened. Now he understood that the best way back into his people’s hearts was through atonement. He had to grovel on his belly.

Be humbled, Amos. Humbled before God and humbled by these ungodly circumstances. They will welcome you back into their hearts.

He stood and walked between the pews. He inhaled the lemony scent of the wood wax—he had insisted upon the brand, as he had insisted on the tiniest detail at Little Heaven. He stood before the chapel window. Night hung over the compound. His face was reflected in the glass. His cheeks were furred with a three-day beard, his eyes set deep in his sockets. No matter. He would feel so much better soon. He had been promised, hadn’t he? All he had to do was fulfill his end of the bargain. And Amos would have help in this, he knew. It was in the water now, in the food they ate and the air they all breathed. They were helpless against the forces marshaling against them. They were mindless insects . But then, in Amos’s eyes, they always had been. They would come back to him, slaves to the sonar in their meek little brains that carried them to Amos like ants back to a poisoned hill.