Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

He encountered other artifacts: tatters of clothing, a busted pocket watch. A wooden doll with the eyes scratched out.

The tunnel bent gently, the rock running smooth as alabaster. He shone the flashlight along its upper curvature, which was so low his head brushed it even as he crawled. It was carpeted with an odd fungoid growth, black and spiky. He raised the flashlight beam to it. The fungus broke apart. What he had mistaken for fungus was in fact a dozing ball of sightless spiders; they scuttled down the tunnel’s circumference, dancing lightly on the rock, vanishing into tiny holes in the floor. Micah noticed that the floor and walls were pocked with thousands of similar holes, tiny pits of darkness the flashlight beam could not penetrate. What else was hiding in there?

The father the father is so thirsty so hungry meat for the feast…

The air got progressively more rotten. He pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth, breathing shallowly. He spotted a bone. Bleached white, picked clean. It could belong to an animal. But animals were too wary to venture down to such a place, weren’t they?

He stared closely at the bone—a long, elegant filigree, the tips polished smooth by time or by… by something sucking on it until the ends went smooth.

Which is when he heard them. The worst, the most awful sounds.

“THERE ARE CALIBRATIONS of the nerve endings, Minny, that you have never known to exist ,” the thing said in little Cort’s voice. “ There are registers that you have never felt, the way dogs can hear sounds humans cannot. I can help you reach them. It will be my pleasure. ”

The thing’s long-fingered hands moved in graceful patterns, its nails tapering to sharp points. Their movements were hypnotic. Minerva felt as if she’d chugged codeine cough syrup.

“ Lay your hands out ,” it said as Cort. “ Palms up, Minny, pretty please .”

Helplessly, she obeyed. It touched a fingernail to a spot on her wrist where the veins ran blue under the skin. The pain was instant and exquisite, like nothing she had ever known. Too painful to scream, even. Its finger withdrew. Her skin had not been broken. There was no mark.

“ I can open you up ,” it said in Cort’s voice. “ I can make you feel as you have never felt before, Minny. Things precious few of your kind have ever known. Would you like that? ”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want you to.”

The creature made a frowny face. Its voice was now a babyish coo: “Why-sy why-sy, pudding and pie-sy? We could have such fun, you and I-sy.”

It reached again. Minerva flinched. Its finger slowly retracted. Its head was cocked on its thin neck, its eyes reflecting the moonlight.

“ It hurt ,” it said in her dead brother’s voice. “ When the snake ate me. It hurt so much, Minny. You didn’t do anything to help. ”

She let out an airless gasp. “Cort, no, I wanted to—”

“ But you didn’t ,” the thing said spitefully. “ Wanting to isn’t doing, Minny. And now what am I? Shit. Snake shit. ”

“Stop,” she whispered.

“ It was pink, Minny. The sun shining through the snake’s skin. The light was pink inside its mouth. Pink with black threads where its veins ran. There was the smell of squashed grasshoppers. I suffocated, but it took a long time. A lot longer than you’d think. My ribs were broke and my lungs filling with blood, but I think I screamed. Do you remember how my screams sounded? I bet you heard me. You weren’t far away. Just up that tree. Safe and sound. ”

“Please stop,” she begged.

The creature touched her other wrist. The pain was immense, world-eating. Its finger withdrew. It blew gingerly on her flesh. The pain receded.

“Shall we begin, my love?”

“No, please no…”

It shook its head with what appeared to be true sadness, as if to say the following events were beyond its power to control. “We must.”

“No, no, no…”

It said, “If it’s information you seek, come and see me. If it is pairs of letters you need, I have consecutively three.”

“Wh-what?”

A macabre smile. “The game, my dear.”

This horrid thing wanted her to answer riddles? She almost laughed at the banality. Then she remembered the words scrawled on the wall back at the Preston School for Boys.

Why is 6 afraid of 7?

789! 789!

“What if I don’t play?”

“You will, my dove.” It spoke as one might when an answer exists beyond all doubt. “And you will lose, because your kind always does. The pain you experience will exist beyond your wildest conception; your purest amazement will be in just how deeply you can feel.” A forlorn sigh. “Your suffering will show me nothing new or novel. I have played this game too many times. There are no secrets your kind has left to tell me.”

“So why even play?”

An expression crossed its face that in the embalmed moonlight could have passed for sorrow. The thing was revolted at itself for what it was—what it couldn’t help but be. But aren’t we all prisoners of our natures, deep down?

SSSSSLLLLLLLLLLLLUUUUUHHHH…

A sucking, slurping sound. Prolonged and somehow chunky. There was a hideous eagerness to it.

These noises drifted through the tunnel and slid into Micah’s ears. He was unprepared for the blast of panic that filled him. He sensed an opening ahead. He clapped his fingers over the flashlight lens, letting just enough light seep through to illuminate the rock directly in front of him. He did not want to announce his presence to whatever might be lurking ahead. He crept forward, blood blitzing through his heart—he was dizzy with the pulse of it.

The sounds intensified. Good Christ, what could be making them?

The tunnel ended. He was able to stand up again. He had entered some kind of vault. Some kind of— lair was the word that skated uneasily through his mind.

He was in a bubble deep inside the rock, perhaps at its very center. He could not intuit its size, but by the frail light leaking through his fingers he saw the walls on either side of the tunnel running upward to give a faint impression of scale. It was less a bubble than a cube.

Or a… a box.

The sucking sounds were louder. Whatever was making them was in here. Carefully, heart thudding, he lifted one finger off the flashlight beam. A slice of light fell across the chamber’s floor. The rock was black as obsidian. The sounds stopped. There was a pregnancy to the pause; Micah pictured a thousand eyes swiveling in his direction.

Amos Flesher , he thought. Is that you?

But he knew it wouldn’t be the Reverend, much as he dearly wished it. There was only so much threat Flesher could pose. The noises in the dark unlocked a far more potent terror. They whispered directly into his veins, mainlining fear into his heart.

The father…

He lifted another finger off the flashlight lens. He could see the odd bone fragment and moldering tatter of clothing. Uniforms? The flashlight dimmed briefly, the contact points on the batteries failing for an instant. Oh Jesus. Not now. Don’t let that happen.

He lifted a third finger. A crease of light cut across the chamber and touched the rock wall thirty-odd yards away—

Something skittered across the beam. A white, wormish fluttering. A network of tubes or something—his instinctual impression was of a gargantuan maggot hacked into sections, the segments stitched into a vaguely humanoid form.

He lifted his final finger clear as dread knotted in his throat. He swept the beam across the chamber, trying to take in as much as he possibly could in hopes of understanding what he was dealing with—