Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

His shoulders slumped. What else could he do? In for a penny…

“Which way did they go?”

THEY WERE ON THEIR WAYback to Little Heaven when it came.

Minerva felt a dry electrical tang at the back of her throat that reminded her of those hot afternoons during her childhood when the sky would scud over with clouds: the taste of a thunderstorm gathering over the horizon.

She checked up in the middle of the ashen path.

“What?” said Micah.

She flicked her head toward the trees. Micah got the hint. They moved quickly, hiding in the heavy dark of the firs ten feet off the path.

The notes of a flute drifted through the air. Jangling, discordant, yet possessed of a rhythm that touched a hidden center in Minerva’s chest, a second heart within the main organ.

She didn’t see much of it. Only a flurrying of legs—the low-hanging branches, laden with needles, prevented her from viewing anything in its entirety. The first pair of legs were abnormally long and stork-like; they passed in a mad dervish, spinning and pirouetting and high-kicking like a court jester. The flute music intensified, sharp notes invading Minerva’s skull and itching at her brain. Other, smaller sets of legs followed. Pale legs streaked with blood. Feet clad in dusty boots or buckled shoes with ruffled socks. They passed silently, only the crunch of their soles on the dead gray earth, their movements manic as they jigged and capered toward the black rock.

Neither Micah nor Minerva moved for some time after the procession passed. Their breath rattled out of their lungs where they knelt under the trees. Micah’s eyelids were squeezed shut. When he finally opened them, she saw a new hardness in his working eye.

“We have to go back,” Micah said. “I have to get down there.”

Her chest tightened. “Into the…”

“That is where they will be.”

Minerva started to shiver. She couldn’t stop.

“Shug, I don’t think I can.”

“I understand.”

“That cave,” she went on, feeling the need to explain. “Those… fingers . Those noises. I want to help. I just don’t think…”

“I understand.”

She put a hand on his leg. His muscles jumped. “Do you have any clue what’s down there, Shug?”

In time he said, “I know it is a bad thing. But then…”

“Then what?”

“I have done bad things, too.”

“You’re talking about human evil. It’s different.”

He did not appear to agree. “We all owe, Minerva. We owe and we are all paying, every day. What else is life but the repayment? But them, what could they owe?”

“Jesus, Shug. What is it you think you owe?”

“They are children, Minny. Only children.”

“Yes.”

“All lives are not equal. Some are worth more than others.”

She said, “I won’t argue it with you.”

“You could return to Little Heaven.”

“I could, yeah,” she said. “But I won’t. I’ll go with you. But I’m telling you right now that I don’t know if I can follow you all the way down there, right to the bottom.”

Micah pressed a finger to his lips. Minerva held her breath. She heard it then—footsteps.

These came from the same direction as the others had—from Little Heaven. Two sets of legs passed this time. An agonized wheeze accompanied them, two sets of lungs heaving.

Micah and Minerva waited until those legs had passed before crawling out from under the trees. Minerva pulled Ellen’s pistol. Micah shone the flashlight up the path, pinning the backs of two men in its beam fifty yards ahead. The men froze. Slowly, they turned.

“Greetings, fellow travelers,” the Reverend said with sunny good cheer.

Bloody as butchers, the two of them. The good Reverend’s hair was slapped on either side of his skull like a muskrat pelt. He was smiling, wide-eyed. Virgil looked like he was ready to burst out crying.

The Reverend reached into his waistband and put something in Virgil’s hand. He stood on his tippy-toes, whispering into Virgil’s ear—

“KILL THEM, MY SON,”the good Reverend said.

The weight of the pistol in Virgil’s hand. A good weight—the weight of finality. Virgil could end it all now. For himself, the Reverend, the one-eyed wonder, and the skinny dyke bitch. End them all. Him , Virgil Quincy Swicker. He had that power now. Maybe that would be the best thing. Better than following that abomination deeper into the woods.

It was all Virgil could do to not put the barrel in his own mouth and pull the trigger. He wanted to do that. He couldn’t get the image of it out of his head. Its enormous body with its flap-a-dangly arms and long, cartoonish legs. Its head and its mouth and its horrible, terrible eyes. How the notes of its flute—a bleached femur bone, it looked like, with holes riddled through it—roused the children from their drugged sleep. They had all gotten up as one, linked hands, and danced into the woods following that horrific piper.

Seeing that, something in Virgil gave over to the madness. He followed the piper into the woods, blood storming through his veins. It didn’t even feel like he was walking—more like he’d stepped onto an enormous buried conveyor belt that was stubbornly pulling him along. At some point, he stared up into a tree and saw, or thought he’d seen, a body glossed by the moonlight. Cyril’s body, just maybe—Cy, his brother from another mother!—spinning bonelessly, lifelessly, at the end of a thick bough. Cy looked like some awful Christmas tree ornament hung by a giant malicious child. Seeing this, a trapdoor sprang open inside Virgil’s head; beneath that door was a stinking yellow room whose bristling and undulating floor suggested that something huge was moving quarrelsomely beneath it…

Things had gone a little hazy after that. The minutes or hours slipped by until… until… until…

And now here he was. In the woods with the Reverend and a gun in his hand.

“ Kill them both.” The Reverend’s honeyed voice in his ear. “End them.”

Virgil was crying. The tears came easily. He barely realized it. When was the last time he’d really sobbed? As a teenager, when he found the body of a stray dog under the bushes in Union Park, kicked to death by some sadistic shitheel. He hadn’t cried since. Never seemed a deep enough need. But he did so now—for the dead fools at Little Heaven; for their children, who were fated for something far worse; for his buddy Cyril, who had been turned into a fucking tree ornament; and for his own dumbshit self, who didn’t have the brains to see a way out of this awful muddle.

The gun came up. He saw it there at the end of his arm, but it didn’t feel like part of him. He pulled the trigger. It was as easy as breathing, it really was.

The bullet creased the air inches from Minerva’s skull. The pop! filled her ears. Her own gun jerked up automatically. She fired. Virgil didn’t go down. He was walking toward her, sobbing the same words over and over. I’m sorry , it might have been. He was bawling like a baby.

He shot again, missing his mark. Pop! She fired and also missed. Her hand trembled. Stop it, goddamn it, stop shaking just st—

A bullet smashed into the ash between her spread legs. She couldn’t stop the shakes. Virgil was walking and firing. He was half blind from crying, but it wouldn’t matter; a few more strides and it would be pretty much a point-blank proposition.

Her finger froze on the trigger. She couldn’t—couldn’t—

Micah snatched the gun out of her hand. Bang. Virgil’s head snapped back in a mist of red. His body was flung with such force that his left foot was ejected from his boot. He rolled bonelessly to the edge of the path. He did not get up.