Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

“ You have been fiddling. Fiddling, fiddling, fiddling…, ” said a familiar voice.

It sat twenty feet to Amos’s left, crouched on the sand. The moon touched its awesome contours, reflecting off the egg-like dome of its skull. It spoke in a perfect mimicry of Sister Muriel.

“ You always were a filthy boy, Amos Flesher. The filthiest , by far. Do you know what will happen if you keep fiddling with your dirty stick, hmm? It will fall off. That’s right! Snap off like a winter icicle, it will. And you will be so ashamed, won’t you? You will have no choice but to bury it in the yard, as a dog does with a bone. Your uuuu-rhine will simply fall from the hole where your little stick once poked, Amos. Yes, as sure as Christ sits in Heaven. ”

Amos took a step back. He realized right then how alone he was, miles and miles from anyone. “I did what you asked.”

The creature made a sound like the chittering of an insect. “ I didn’t ask anything of you ,” it said as Sister Muriel.

A thin wire of unease threaded into Amos’s heart. The thing chittered on and on. It was too dark for Amos to tell if the sound was coming from some part of its odd anatomy or if this was its version of laughter.

“Not me, no, no, no,” it said, this time in a voice that might have been its own: high and breathy, the voice of a baby who had learned to enunciate its words. “My father asked… my father, my father, my daddykins…”

“Your… your father?”

The thing squatted in the sand, repeating those two words over and over. “My father, my father, my father…”

The understanding rocked Amos. This thing was no more than the lapdog of a far greater entity. Comprehending this, the sight of it—its bloated belly, its bird legs and button eyes—now filled Amos with disgust. Hunched in the dark, babbling the same two idiot words: My father, my father. It was nothing but an overgrown mynah bird with a gift for impressions. It made Amos sick to look at it now—no different from those soft-brained children at the orphanage he’d delighted in jabbing with a pin.

“Where?” he said to it. “ Where , you filthy thing?”

The thing raised its arm, one exquisitely long finger pointing at the cleft.

“My father is waiting.”

MICAH ROUNDED THE BLACK ROCK.Minerva lagged behind, still shaken from the encounter with Virgil. He pressed on without her. Maybe it was best she stay out of it.

Micah’s mind was cluttered; he lacked a great deal of information, and under normal circumstances he would retreat and regroup. But there was no time for that and he was fueled by a rage more profound than anything he’d experienced in years. Worse than what he’d felt for Seaborn Appleton or even his old Captain Beechwood.

He would kill the Reverend. He should have done it the first time he’d laid eyes on the man. He had practically smelled the crazy seeping out of him—it had a scent, true craziness did: the stench of old flooring rotted through with cat piss. Micah had sensed the malice festering in the fuming wastes of the Reverend’s soul, and he should have put a bullet in his brain right then and there… but Charlie and Otis had taken his sidearm, robbing him of the opportunity.

Abruptly, Micah came to the cleft. He had been so taken up with thoughts of vengeance that he lost track of time. He shone his flashlight into the crevice. Moody blue shadows gave way to deeper enveloping blacks. He spun on his heel, alerted by a klaxon blaring in his unconscious mind—

Something loomed motionlessly out in the sand. A huge humanlike form plated in moonlight.

“ Fine evening for a perambulation, eh, Private? ”

It was the voice of Captain Beechwood. The thing issued a terrible flapping sound like an enormous cockroach beating its wings.

“ My father is waiting ,” it said in Beechwood’s voice. “ My father will just let some air into those children, Private Shughrue. Just a little air. My father is thirsty. So thirsty. Hungry. Yes. Meat. ” Its mouth stretched wide, splitting its entire face in two; then its jaws snapped shut with a sound like wood planks spanked together. “ Meat for the feast. My father, my father, my father… ”

It pointed at the cleft. Micah took a few steps in that direction, his eye never leaving the thing. It did not move or try to stop him. In fact, it appeared to be urging him inside. Micah aimed his flashlight into the gap again. Dust sifted down, sparkling in the beam.

“ My father is waiting… ”

He entered the cleft. Beads of sweat popped on his brow. He held a hand out for balance; it brushed the cave wall and he recoiled, disturbed once again by the soft and somehow fleshy character of the rock. It felt like the skin of a sick old man, smoothed and made clammy with age and disease. The darkness sucked in on him with unnatural avidity; it hungered after the feeble beam shed by his flashlight, nibbling at its glow with invisible black teeth.

He passed under the colony of olms and came to the precipice rather quickly. The rope ladder clattered against the rock, down and down, stirred by a subterranean wind—or by someone who had recently climbed down it. He stared down to the tunnel below. An odor drifted up, almost too faint to credit. A smell that spoke of childhood. A mix of bubble gum and dime-store perfume, the blood off skinned knees and chocolate coins wrapped in shiny foil. It was all of those things, but corrupted somehow. Mixed with the smell that permeates an old folks’ home: sickness and dust and the yellowing reek of bodies rotting from the inside out. The smell of living death.

Staring down, Micah pictured something hunched just past the mouth of the tunnel. His mind couldn’t entirely compass it. But the outline was of a person of unfathomable age: two hundred, three hundred, a thousand years old. He pictured this corrupted thing quivering in the darkness below, leering with its young-old mouth, its gums black as tar—

Micah’s jaw tensed. “I am coming,” he whispered.

He stuffed the flashlight into his pocket and dropped one foot down until it touched the first rung of the ladder. He gripped the ropes as the ladder swung out from the rock, throwing him off balance. He stabilized himself and followed it down. The flashlight shone inside his pocket, its tepid glow illuminating the space directly below him.

It came then. Thick, throaty—the laughter of a child.

Shapes swarmed in the darkness below. Alien, twisting movements. Micah’s bladder clenched. Fear poured into his brain; he stood rooted for a span of time he could not judge, then slowly pulled the flashlight from his pocket. When he shone it down, nothing was there.

The ladder slapped the stone. His foot found the basin floor. He released the ladder and turned, kneeling, shining the flashlight into the tunnel.

The beam outlined the start of a cave system carved through the rock. Micah crept to the tunnel mouth. It stretched twenty feet or so before hitting a bend. The tunnel was honeycombed with holes—some small, others big enough to accommodate a person’s body. He wondered just how large this network of tunnels could be, and where they all might lead.

Body tensed, head throbbing, he forged into the alkaline dark.

“DO YOU LIKE TO PLAY…games?”

Minerva stopped. The voice belonged to a small child. She turned toward it, summoning every ounce of her willpower. Something squatted in the dark not far from the cleft, which she had arrived at some minutes after Shughrue. The moon gave only a hint of this thing’s contours.

“Games,” the voice called. “Shall we play?”