Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Ssssslllllllllllluuuuuhhhh…

Micah swung the flashlight. The light bled beneath Preston’s suspended feet. He saw something, and followed it up to Preston’s body. Micah had somehow missed it on the initial sweep.

A tube ran out below Preston’s bottom rib. It was white and wrinkled, like the milky intestines of a gutted fish. The tube trailed down to the floor and wormed into the dark. It flexed and cramped the way a garden hose does when fed water from a tap; it swelled in places as if something larger, more solid, were passing through it.

Micah followed it without wanting to.

His blood ran cold. Micah had never been much for books, but he did enjoy a dime-store paperback from time to time. The Feasting Dead. That had been a pretty good one. The Body Snatchers , too. In such books, he had read that phrase a dozen times. His blood ran cold. He didn’t know much about writing, but he knew that was a lazy cliché, right up there with water through a sieve and a deer caught in headlights .

Yet this was his exact sensation. A paralyzing chill swept through him—it was as if his blood had been sucked out and stashed in a deep freeze and injected back into his veins. A coldness that made his lungs lock up and his bowels throb with the urge to be voided.

The tube ran out of Augustus Preston and into a small body. A boy’s body. Could that be Eli Rathbone—?

If it was Eli, there was precious little boyish about him anymore. Eli lay limp on the floor, eyes open in an expression of unending horror. The tube— the umbilicus , Micah thought; that is what it looks like, a huge elongated umbilical cord —expanded into a funnel, which was latched over the boy’s mouth. The cord rippled at its tip as if tiny insects were trundling under its surface; Eli’s body jerked helplessly as the cord cramped and flexed, as that awful slurping sound filled the air.

Not wanting to but unable to stop himself, Micah followed Eli’s body with the beam. Eli’s hand was linked with that of a small girl—Elsa Rasmussen? Who else could it be? Their hands were melted into a carbuncled knob. The girl was welded to the boy behind her in the same manner, and that boy to another boy, and him to another, and another, and perhaps ten more after that. Their bodies rag-dolled into the nether recesses of the vaulted box, chained together through some hideous alchemy. Eli looked the worst by far; Elsa was a bit better, and the two boys a bit better than her. It was as if something was feeding on them in turn: First Eli, who was almost used up. Then Elsa, then the two boys who looked like brothers. The most recent additions appeared relatively unmarked. Micah was looking at a food chain in the most literal sense.

The children behind the two boys were still clothed. Their eyes were open, too—their pupils constricted when the beam touched them—but they were unmoving and unspeaking, as if they had been injected with a paralysis toxin from a giant spider. Micah shone the beam to chart the upper reaches of the chamber, expecting to see a huge shaggy arachnid hanging from the ceiling, rappelling toward him eagerly on a skein of gossamer thick as a steel cable… but there were only those red ropes rising to knit with the rock.

Micah forced himself to approach Preston. It was only a few steps, but scaling Everest would have been easier. He had no idea how big the man had been before, but whatever process his body had been subject to had altered it horribly. Now that Micah was up close, he could see that Preston wasn’t just thin—he had shrunk , his arms and legs shortening, the bones dissolving or something, until he was nothing but a twisted effigy. He was no more than four feet tall, an emaciated dwarf.

The chamber was silent except for that suck-suck , and even that had quieted. He stopped a foot from Preston. The man’s body did not give off any sort of smell—not of age, or rot. He looked almost mummified: the topmost layer of his skin was crackly, the crust of a flaky pie. Micah was sure the faintest touch would cause it to crumble away entirely, exposing the bleached bone. Dear Auggie had been consumed by some relentless hungering force—and now, with Preston used up, that same force had reached out for other sustenance. The sweetest, youngest delicacies it could find.

Preston’s eyelids were shut. Micah wasn’t certain he would find eyes behind those lids; if anything, they might resemble putrefying grapes. He had no intention of finding out. The red ropes radiated a pleasant warmth. A vein of solid light shone inside each of them. He gingerly shifted around Preston, shining the flashlight to make sure nothing lurked out of sight. Then he trained the beam on the gruesome cord running out of Preston’s body to attach to Eli’s face. Micah’s free hand gripped the hilt of the bayonet he’d taken from the Preston School days before—

Watery voices drifted in from the tunnel. Minerva? He wanted to shout out to her— Stay away! —but he might need her help, and selfishly he did not want to face this alone.

His gaze fell on Preston’s spine. Preston’s right arm was tucked behind his back in a chicken wing that would have snapped his bones under normal circumstances; his forearm was shielding something on his lower back. Biting down on his revulsion, Micah used the flashlight to lever that arm up; it moved with the dry creak of ancient leather. There was a long slit across Preston’s spine, six inches above his buttocks. A full foot long, running from hip to hip. The lips of the wound were dry and hard as cured meat. The flesh inside those lips was bright pink. The wound looked somehow fresh.

The voices drew nearer. Micah barely heard them. He was fixated on the wound…

Without much thought, he unsheathed the bayonet. He touched the tip of it to one edge of the wound in Preston’s back. It split the gummy surface; clear fluid burped through. Now there was a smell coming from Preston, almost indescribable—the stink of pure putrefaction and death. He let the nausea pass. The lips of flesh opened and closed as if breathing. Mesmerized, disgusted, he reinserted the bayonet tip into the wound. The blade sank into ripe, squishy softness. Preston did not stir. Micah ran the blade through the wound lightly, slitting a translucent layer gluing the lips together. They pulled apart in a pink leer—

Micah could see something inside. Runneled and warty like a diseased brain.

It… Did it move ?

The enormous umbilical cord jerked, spastically. Micah’s consuming urge was to step on it, crimp the line—would the pressure build until it ruptured, spewing…?

Breathing shallowly, trying to inhale as little of the stench as possible—the air swam with the fumes wafting from the slit—Micah inserted the knife again. The blade dimpled the pink and carbuncled thing inside. It twitched hectically, somehow gleefully. The cord whipped and spasmed; the sucking intensified, and Micah could hear the children’s bodies shucking and jerking in the darkness.

The blade opened a one-inch secondary cut in the pink flesh inside the wound. Micah pulled the bayonet away. Whatever lay inside the smaller cut was black and shiny. It radiated a powerful sense of malice that Micah could feel physically—it felt as if burning ants were crawling over every inch of his flesh.

Oh Jesus, what is that what is that what IS that—

The pinkness closed over the black bulb momentarily before opening again. That blackness radiated an ageless festering rage.

With a thunderclap of understanding, Micah realized what it was.

An eye. Purest black. And that eye had just blinked. Or winked.

In the same instant, Augustus Preston’s head cranked around to face Micah. It should not be anatomically possible, as Preston had been hanging in the opposite direction—but it happened all the same, his neck making horrid snapping sounds as it twisted, the skin of his throat tearing like cheesecloth to display a papery tube that could have been his trachea. His eyelids flew open; Micah had been mistaken in thinking Preston’s eyes must have shriveled away; they stared at him now with a bright malignancy and a profound insanity—the look of someone whose brain had been utterly ruined. And yet there was hatred in that gaze, too, the loathing that can accrue only in the mind and heart of any creature that has had to exist in such a place for so long—a hatred for anything that has experienced love, humor, and the simple pleasure of sunlight on its face.