Little Heaven

1

YOUR DADDY OWES MY DADDY.

The Long Walker traveled on. Petty followed helplessly, her hand engulfed in its own. The woods are lovely, dark and deep—that was a line from a poem her mother read to her years ago, before slipping into her big sleep.

The trees creaked in a gentle breeze that ruffled the hem of Petty’s nightgown. She wasn’t cold or hungry or thirsty, though she should be all of those things by now. Here and there the boughs dropped away to give a view of the sky salted with bright stars.

Your daddy owes my daddy…

The Long Walker had told her this at the start of their journey. What had her father done, and to whom? Her dad was a strong and clever man, but she doubted he would double-cross anyone, especially anything that might count the Long Walker as its son.

The Long Walker spidered up the side of a cliff, its feet finding hidden grooves in the rock. It cradled Petty lovingly; with her ear pressed to its chest, she could hear the strange workings of its insides: a cresting buzz, as if its chest was all honeycombs crawling with wasps.

The trees grew sickly and sparse. A huge formation came into view: darker than the night sky, with a density that made her body shrink inside her skin. Was the Long Walker taking her there? She couldn’t even imagine it.

I will go crazy, she thought simply.

She knew that wasn’t how it happened. People didn’t “go crazy,” not all at once. It was something that occurred more slowly. A person starts to hear voices, or she thinks people are looking at her when really they’re not. Those worries get worse, and that person slowly slips into insanity. But Petty could see it happening another way, too. A person experiences something so horrible that it tears her brain in half—a crack zigzagging across a frozen river, the black madness pouring in all at once.

The trees gave way to a sandy slope leading to the monolithic rock. She tried to jerk her hand out of the Long Walker’s grip. It laughed softly at her struggles.

“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to go.”

“One two three four five six seven,” it said in a voice Pet recognized as her own mother’s. “All good children go to heaven.”

“Don’t.” Her cheeks flushed with anger despite her fear. “Don’t you talk like her, you… you asshole,” she said, summoning the vilest word she knew.

The Long Walker grinned, perhaps admiring her spunk. The towering shadow of the rock cast over them even in the dead of night. Coldness seeped off of it, and a faraway sense of panic wormed into her veins.

“Have you ever heard a newborn cry as it awakes from a nightmare?” the Long Walker asked. Petty was too stunned by its question to reply.

“A newborn, only a few days old,” it went on. “They have nightmares, but not as you would understand. Their minds are unformed, as was your own at that age. A newborn baby can still see the world behind the world, you see? The world where my daddy lives, and me and a few others like us. They can still see us. That’s why they scream as they do.”

Petty swallowed hard. “Because they’re… they’re scared of you?”

“No, precious. Because they don’t want us to leave them.”

They reached a cleft in the rock. The Long Walker guided her inside. It had to stoop to make its way through the dark and twisting cavern. They went deeper and deeper, until the light died. The Long Walker was untroubled by the darkness, though—it navigated as if by some kind of sonar, never stumbling, bearing Petty quickly along. There came a faint squishing from overhead, but that quickly dwindled. The mineral smell of the rock invaded Petty’s nostrils. She stepped on something that made a metallic rattle under her feet. She caught a glimpse of a child’s toy browned with rust.

They came to a drop. A rope ladder was rolled up at the ledge, its rungs salted with dust that had accumulated over a period of years. The Long Walker sat, its legs dangling over the edge. It had no need of the ladder; it skinned down the rocks, carrying Petty effortlessly. At the bottom was another tunnel. The Long Walker urged her inside of it—Petty had stopped fighting, realizing it was useless to try. It swept in behind her, its body filling the entire tunnel. She couldn’t see a thing, yet she never bumped a wall or hit a dead end. She might as well have been moving through outer space.

They crawled for some time. Petty didn’t even think she was crawling—she was motionless, her limbs made sluggish with worry, and yet she moved. The Long Walker propelled her forward through some manner of infernal mechanics; she felt as if she were on a moving walkway, or had been harnessed to a remorseless winch that was pulling her toward… likely nothing she’d ever want to meet.

The tunnel emptied into what her senses told her was an enormous vault—the air wasn’t as tight, and she got an impression of vastness, as if she’d stepped into a warehouse. But she still couldn’t see anything. That was frightening enough. It was like waking in the middle of the night in your bed and waiting for your eyes to adjust. But at least then you’re still in your warm bed, in your house, with your parents not far away. Here she was totally alone…

No. There was something else in here.

That’s what was raising the hackles on her neck, what was making the flesh crawl up her throat.

“I’m home, Daddy.” The Long Walker danced, limbs swinging and kicking. “Home again, home again, jiggety jig.”

It pranced into the center of the space toward whatever it was that inspired fright to flutter like a bird’s wings in Petty’s chest. Its body kicked off a weird deep-sea glow… and that’s where Petty may as well have been right now: a hundred miles under the surface of the deepest sea, hopelessly alone.

The light of its body touched the shape of another shape. Petty staggered back with a scream rising in her throat.

I will go crazy in a second was the thought that rabbited through her mind. And maybe that’s for the best.

2

MICAH, MINERVA, AND EBENEZER set off from the godforsaken cabin before daybreak. Minerva was plagued by worries that its luckless occupant might peel himself from his perch upon the wall and shamble forth, blood spluttering from the severed stump of his neck, to avenge the loss of his head—which was by then a roasted, hatchet-cleaved husk in the stove.

They had debated burying the poor man’s remains, but that was a problematical proposition, owing to the fact that his body, while indeed headless, was still moving: the legs quivering, the arms spasming against the heavy pelt tacks pierced through his flesh. Even trying to bury a motionless body would tax both their energy and sanity, which was already somewhat on the trembling edge—as such, they regretfully opted to leave him hanging on the wall.

Having made their decision, they hunkered down a couple hundred yards from the cabin. But the proximity was too much for Minerva: she kept hearing the choking, garbled laughter of the hunter’s decapitated head as it baked in the stove; she swore that she could overhear his spiteful chuckles spindling up through the tin chimney and atomizing into the air like so much lunacy-inducing smoke.

“Let’s go,” she said to them before dawn had even broken.

They walked, resolutely. Their bodies ached, joints screaming. They were fifteen years older than they’d been the last time they made this trek. The land was unchanged, but they were different. Gray hair, wrinkles, shot nerves. Ebenezer’s knee felt as though it had been hollowed out and packed full of fire ants. As the hills grew steeper, Minerva regretted every belt of gutrot whiskey she’d drunk and every unfiltered cigarette she’d smoked in the interceding years. The fear was what wearied them the most—fear had a terrible way of getting inside your chest, sucking at you like a vampire until every step became a misery.

But the nearer they came to the black rock, the more their pains receded. Exhaustion and thirst and hunger deserted them. Their pace actually picked up. Micah had heard that people who perished of hypothermia felt the same way: their brains kicked out a powerful natural narcotic that caused a rosy glow to settle over their minds as their organs froze inside of them.

They spoke as they walked. The darkness unlocked their lips—they spoke, if only to drive that blackness away. They raised questions of an unanswerable nature that had dogged them the last fifteen years.

“What do you think it is?” Minerva asked. “I’ve always wondered. A demon?”

“Mammon,” said Ebenezer. “Demon of greed. A minor demon, but even a minor one is cause for alarm, right?” A wan laugh. “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. Scripture of Matthew. I saw an old painting in a book. This hunched, goblinny thing. For a while I’d thought…”

They followed the shadowed path. Creatures stirred faintly in the underbrush.

“But I don’t think so now,” Eb went on. “If I believed it was a demon, then I would have to believe in its opposite, in God, the pantheon of angels and all the rest. And despite the fact that I see His face every night—or what that thing will have me believe is His face—I do not trust in God’s existence.”

“What about the other thing?” said Minerva. “Ole daddy longlegs that you lit up like a Roman candle?”

Ebenezer shrugged. “A familiar? Same as a black cat to a witch? What I want to know is why it doesn’t leave. Think about it. What it did to all the animals in these woods—what it turned them into. What it must have done to the minds of Amos Flesher and just about everyone else at Little Heaven. It is an immensely powerful entity, is it not?”

Neither Minerva nor Micah would dispute it.

“So why does it live in that rock?” Eb went on. “Why feed—is that what it does? Feed? Let’s assume so. Why not set up shop someplace where the pickings are more plentiful?”

Micah had thought about this, too. Perhaps the thing was not so insatiable as Ebenezer suspected. Perhaps it was like a snake. It ate plentifully, dining on the sweetest flesh: on children, as it seemed to have more of an appetite for them than the older, stringier members of our species. Though perhaps it wasn’t about the quality of our meat, lamb versus mutton—it was the quality of a child’s spirit, its virginal state, versus the corrupted and corroded worldview of an adult. Once it had eaten, it had no need to seek prey again for possibly decades—so long as it had a host like Augustus Preston or Amos Flesher, something to suck on slowly like an after-dinner mint. If it were to migrate to some more populated place, it might be found out. This thing had been plying its trade a long time, and this was its happy hunting ground.

But there was another possibility—one that had dawned years ago, when Micah fleetingly touched those glowing ropes that had borne Augustus Preston aloft. He’d felt such warmth and wonderment in that instant. Those ropes felt… heavenly. So perhaps those ropes held both Preston and the thing in thrall…?

Maybe the black rock wasn’t the thing’s home. What if it was its prison?

The trees bled away. They came to a spot where the foliage grew sparsely. A rough circle of blast. The vegetation was thinner, struggling to thrive. The leaves of the shrubs were a sick shade of off-white, eaten through with disease. They checked up, a signal pinging in their primal brains.

“Little Heaven,” said Minerva. “We’re standing on its remains.”

The diameter of the patch mimicked the size of the compound. Although there was no clear sign that Minerva was correct—they did not see the rusted ribs of the main gate poking up from the grayish dirt, or the flame-scoured remains of the massive crucifix that had once topped the chapel roof—they were each certain of it. Something emanated from the ground, seeping up like poisoned oil: the curdled, blighted miasma of Little Heaven. The fire-eaten bodies of its worshippers stirred in with the earth. Their ghostly voices drifting up, lamenting, searching for something—relief, perhaps even revenge. Against whom? Whom could they pin the blame on except themselves? Or had their souls ascended heavenward at the moment of their death, as Amos Flesher must have promised? Had they died in a state of grace?

Micah and Ebenezer followed Minerva across the circle of barren ground. The wind scudded at their heels, raising cones of dust. Quite suddenly, Minerva had to tamp down the powerful urge to cry. She swiped her cheeks, certain her fingers would come away wet with tears. But they were dry as bone, dry as the cracked earth under her boots.

“I’m sorry,” she said, though she could not say for whom this apology was meant.

They entered the thicker tree line at the edge of the perimeter. They felt it sucking at their spines—the grieving, implacable tug of Little Heaven, its grim memories, its souls interred beneath the sunbaked dirt—until that tension released, freeing them with almost an audible sigh.

“How do we know the world isn’t full of such things?” said Ebenezer later.

“What things?” said Minerva.

Ebenezer stared up at the sky, pricked with guttering stars. “A man descends into madness, a family goes missing, a backwoods religious compound burns to ashes—how do we know that the cause is earthly? Known? Often we never find out. But we tell ourselves it must be so because to invite other possibilities is to invite madness into our hearts, isn’t it?”

They walked for quite some time in silence, pondering this. Ebenezer had exhausted his capacity for speech. He dragged his leg behind him like a curse.

“There’s one thing I’ve always wondered, Shug,” Minerva said.

Micah made a questioning grunt.

“When we were all there in the rock, you menacing it with the knife like you were going to hack it to pieces,” Minerva said. “This is weird to say, it being so small and weak-looking and all, but… did you get the impression it was all that scared, really?”

This had occurred to Micah as well. At the time, he had believed it was frightened, the way it flinched and mewled. But over the years, he had come to wonder if it had merely been pretending. How could anything like that have any fear of man? Perhaps it had been an act. One facet of the grand game it had played with them all.

“I cannot say.”

“Because it’s not weak, is it?” said Minerva. “Not at all. Christ, it won’t let me die. I can’t even… It won’t even let God take me. Or the devil.”

“I have a theory about that,” Ebenezer said. “What if its power over you is directly influenced by how close you draw to it? Picture a nuclear reactor with a leak. If you’re ten thousand miles away, you’ll feel nothing. If you’re right next to it—if you stick your hand into it—then you’re dead. The closer you get, the more power it has over you. You carry that sickness the rest of your life, okay. But in order for you to truly be at its mercy, you’d have to enter the black rock.”

Minerva nodded, accepting this. “Why did it grant us those wishes, then—because it knew they would cause us more pain than not granting them?”

Neither Micah nor Ebenezer answered her. The truth seemed all too plain.

They hiked until the trees thinned out. The creatures that had plagued them all those years ago—the ones that had torn off Terry Redhill’s head and Ebenezer’s ear, that had ended Otis Langtree’s and Charlie Fairweather’s lives—were not in evidence. They had no use under present circumstances: Micah and the others were making their way to their master’s lair willingly, if not eagerly.

Dawn began to gloss the horizon. They staggered, their legs failing—and then, quite suddenly, they were there.

The gray sand and paling sky. The black rock.

“Dypaloh,” Micah said. “There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands.”

Ebenezer and Minerva looked at him, confused.

“Read that somewhere,” he said. “Exact opposite of this.”

They rounded the face of the rock where it sheared on a ninety-degree scaling. It was the same as ever—towering, featureless, obsidian. There were no crags or outcroppings where birds might build nests, but then, it would seem an unwise choice for any living thing to dwell upon it. The rock was cold, though the day itself was heating up; a chill radiated off it, as if the coils of a refrigerator were humming behind a quarter inch of stone. The polished surface reflected their features with a funhouse-mirror warp: they somehow looked younger in that shadowy reflection, as if their old selves were trapped in there, too. In many ways, that was true, as a part of them had never left this place.

They hiked around the sheer obsidian angles, and in time they reached the cleft. Though it was now daytime, the sun was blanketed by thick gray clouds. But even if the sun had been shining at full wattage, its light would not have penetrated far inside the rock.

Micah unpacked the last of his gear. He lit the kerosene lantern and tested his flashlight. He patted his pocket to make sure his Buck knife was still there. He shouldered his backpack again. Minerva noticed him wince under its weight.

“You can stay out here,” he said to them.

“Shut up,” Minerva said. “You know we damn well can’t, so quit saying it.”

“We can’t?” Eb said.

“You can,” said Minerva.

Eb seemed to consider taking her up on the offer, but ultimately he shook his head.

“In for a penny,” he said, squinting up at the sky.

THAT OLD SMELL—the smell of living decay—hit their noses the moment they entered the cavern. Darkness swiftly closed over them. The lantern threw wavering shadows on the smooth, dripping rock walls. Their footsteps made no sound: they could have been stepping across an enormous wet sponge. They were filled with terror—as stark as the silvery flash of minnows in a dark pool—but they had no choice. They had surrendered that choice years ago.

“Olms,” Micah said at one point.

He held the lantern above his head; its light fled up to a domed ceiling bubbled within the rock. “There were olms up there last time.”

“The hell are those?” said Minny.

“Salamanders of a sort,” he said. “Thousands of them. White ones.”

Minny said, “Well, ain’t it a crying shame they’re gone.”

Micah managed a smile. If this had an endgame feeling to it—and yes, it surely did—then why not have a few laughs before the curtain came down?

They reached the ledge. The darkness yawned. The rope ladder was still there, rolled up right where Micah had left it. The strangest thing. He remembered watching Ellen climb it fifteen years ago, the backs of her legs trembling in exertion. He recognized that some part of her must still be here, too.

Micah kicked the ladder over the edge; its rungs clattered against the stone as it unfurled. They climbed down. Ebenezer stopped halfway, his knuckles white on the rope, breathing in short doglike pants.

“I’m okay,” he said, to himself more than to the other two. “I’m not, actually, but that’s okay. That’s perfectly acceptable.”

They clustered in the basin facing the tunnel mouth. A sound emanated from it: a languorous exhale, as if the rock itself were breathing. Their faces were pale and sweat-stung in the lantern’s light.

Micah unshouldered his pack and put it on backward so that it hung from his chest. He crawled in first, holding the lantern. The tunnel was peppered with other holes, both small and large, holding teeming knots of darkness. Not a goddamned thing had changed. It was like crawling through an old dream that got progressively worse, narrowing to a perfect speck of darkness—the center of the nightmare.

The kids, Micah thought. We saved them. They would still be down here otherwise. That is the only change—they are not here. That is a good difference.

Ooooh, but wait, whispered a silky, devious voice in his ear. Some of them are still here, aren’t they?

The tunnel ended. One by one, they crawled out and stood within the great, dark vault. Micah set the lantern down and shrugged off his pack. He found his flashlight and swept it through the inky—

“No” was all he heard Minny say. One word, flatly stated. Her voice full of horror.

3

FIFTEEN YEARS. One-fifth of the average human lifespan, give or take. Yet time tended to behave oddly; it was never static, and people felt it differently depending on circumstance. For a child squirming in his desk on the last day of school, those final minutes before the bell rang could seem endless. When that same boy passed through adulthood to old age, those same minutes could pass without his knowing.

Fifteen years. For the Reverend Amos Flesher, they must have been an eternity.

He hung in a web of scintillating red ropes. His body had shrunken and seized up; his feet, which had once touched the ground, now dangled nearly a foot above it. His skin was as brown and dry and moistureless as a chunk of liver forgotten in the back of a freezer. He looked somehow wooden. His toes were curled and hooked upward in grisly curlicues, like awful genie shoes. His lips had thinned away to transparencies, his teeth brown and cracked. The fretwork of ropes creaked softly like the hull of an old Spanish galleon on the night sea.

Micah swept the flashlight past this horrible sight, moving left… His breath caught.

“Pet.”

His daughter stood behind the Reverend. Motionless, her face crawling with dread. Micah stepped toward her. The flashlight disclosed another shape behind her. Its fingers curled possessively on Petty’s shoulder, its upper body swathed in darkness.

The Big Thing. The Flute Player.

“Daddy, please.”

Micah could not tell if it was his daughter who had spoken or the thing behind her—it was an uncanny mimic, as he recalled. He held up his hands in surrender.

“She is all I want.”

“Ass, gas, or grass,” the Big Thing said in his daughter’s voice. “Nobody rides for free, Daddy-o.”

Micah nodded. Instinctively, he knew what to do. He pulled the knife from his pocket and unfolded the blade. He approached the Reverend. The slit in his back, the one Shughrue had carved into it all those years ago, was still wet, still… weeping. Gingerly, Micah touched the tip of the knife to its edge. A membrane burst, spilling noxious nectar down the Reverend’s flesh. The smell was that of a cracked-open coffin. Micah glanced at Amos’s face, wondering if any of this was registering; the Reverend’s eyelids were fissured with tiny dry cracks that seemed on the verge of ripping open, spilling his eyeballs down his cheeks.

Micah turned his attention back to the slit. He drew the blade across it, severing the protective sac. Something turned inside the wound, fat and slug-like; the sight was reminiscent of a cat stretching itself on a warm windowsill.

“Micah, what are you…?” Minerva said somewhere behind him.

The thing began to push itself out forcefully, with hard flexes and shoves. The Reverend shook helplessly; a second rip spread across his abdomen, and a desiccated loop burped through the split. His crotch—which was essentially sexless by now, just a flaccid free-hanging tube like a spent condom and a terribly distended and elongated sack with a pair of BBs rolling around inside—swayed lewdly, parodically. Micah stumbled back, the sight so overwhelming that his knees buckled, fear rushing through his brain as the thing muscled its way out with determined thrusts and the other thing, its helpmate, laughed the same way his daughter did at Scooby-Doo and Scrappy on the Saturday morning cartoons—

The thing slid out of the Reverend’s back and landed on the floor. At nearly the same instant, the ropes mooring the Reverend let go. The Reverend fell gracelessly and crumpled to the floor in a boneless heap…

Then Amos Flesher began to shriek.

His screams drilled through the air and ricocheted off the walls. They started out hoarsely, his vocal cords seized from disuse, but built to a lung-rupturing pitch. They were the gibbering bleats of a lunatic—a madness so profound it was all but unimaginable.

“No, Daddy!” he squealed as he bucked and writhed on the stone. “You don’t love me anymore you don’t love me never stop loving meeeeeee!”

Micah was overcome with pity. Amos Flesher was a devil—the cruelest man he had ever encountered, and he had run across many in his lifetime—but to see him there, naked and wizened as he shuddered on the floor with a kind of horrid, lascivious glee… Micah wanted to do something, if only to shut him up and end his misery. But he could not. He was completely paralyzed.

The Reverend’s hands—brown and sinewy and hooked into talons—danced in the air. His legs moved as if he was trying to climb an invisible staircase. He began to rip at his wasted body. His skin tore all too easily. Chunks of his chest and arms ripped free like enormous scabs. He screamed and laughed until he ran out of breath and began to gag helplessly as his hands rose to his face, scrabbling at his cheeks and nose and finally his eyes, which burst dryly, like spore bags, releasing splintered puffs of matter.

“Daddy!” he mewled, crawling blindly toward the thing that had lived inside of him for fifteen years, feeding on him in some terrible way, wrecking him in a manner no human should have to experience. “Pleeeeeaase, oh pleeeease, don’t leeeeave me, Daddy!”

He scrabbled toward the wet pink baby-thing, moaning and spluttering. The Big Thing left Petty’s side; it strode forward, and with quick, methodical ease, it stepped on the Reverend Amos Flesher’s skull. A sickening crunch. The Reverend’s reedlike legs jittered. Then they quit moving.

Micah waited, his breath whinnying out of him. When the Big Thing did not move, he took a wide berth around the squirming baby-thing and went to his daughter. The Big Thing knelt, fingering the remains of Flesher’s broken skull case. The Reverend’s brain was pale and dry, leeched of moisture, like some kind of cheap, crumbled cheese.

Micah knelt in front of Petty, inspected her for injuries. “Did it hurt you?”

She shook her head. She seemed both alert and hazy at once, as though trapped in a very vivid dream she was helpless to wake from.

“Are you okay?”

“Are you here?” she said. “Really here?”

“You are not dreaming, Pet. I am here.”

“I’m scared.”

“Me too. More than you can imagine.”

“It said you owed its daddy. What do you owe, Dad?”

Everything, Pet. Everything I can possibly give.

Micah turned to the things, the father and its doting son. “I know what you want. But you have to let them all go.”

The Big Thing squatted beside the baby. For some time, they held a silent palaver.

“What if we want… everything?” the Big Thing finally said.

“You do not want them,” Micah said evenly. “You never did.”

The two things conferred further. The Big Thing appeared to chuckle.

“Yes,” it said. “Just one of you will do.”

“And you must lift the curse. Take it back.”

A smile touched the corners of the Big Thing’s mouth. “Curse? My father should be outraged. Was it not exactly what you wished for?”

Micah said nothing. In time, the Big Thing nodded. “As you wish. My father is merciful.”

Micah turned to Ebenezer and Minerva. “Take her,” he said. “Quickly.”

“Micah, no,” said Minerva. “What are you—?”

Micah turned away. He couldn’t stand to look at them. He had known from the outset that it would come to this. He had realized—in the deepest, most honest chamber of his heart—that it would have to end like this. It was the only way. The creature would take all of them, or it would take Micah alone. But Micah had to give himself willingly. And he knew the thing wanted him so, so badly. For he was surely the only member of his species who had ever caused it true fear, true pain, in its vast and fearsome life.

Micah turned back to confront his daughter’s agonized face. He hugged Pet tightly. With her arms pinned to her sides, she was too surprised to return it. He felt the heat of her body and the rapid beat of her heart. He tried to imprint it in his mind: her warmth, her innocence, all the love pouring out of him into her.

“I love you, Pet.” She shimmered before him. “I love you so much. And your mother, of course. More than anything on earth. You be sure to tell her that, okay? You tell her how much I love you both. Will you do that?”

His daughter nodded obediently. He wondered if she had any idea of just how much he loved her. Does a child ever understand the irrational, endless love of a parent?

“Go, then,” he said. “And do not ever come back. Do you hear me?”

“No, Daddy. I won’t go without you.”

“It cannot be any other way, my love. You do not understand, but you have to trust me. I am begging you.”

Minerva and Ebenezer stood in the sputtering light of the lantern. Micah appealed to them next. “Go. Now. What in hell’s name are you waiting for?”

“We can’t just—” Minerva started.

Micah stilled her with a look. She knew, too. As did Ebenezer. This was the only possible way. The cards were stacked against them. Those cards had begun to stack the moment Micah had accepted Ellen Bellhaven’s request to take her to Little Heaven to find her missing nephew.

Micah tried to let go of his daughter. His arms wouldn’t unlock. He wanted to hold her forever. But he had to let go.

His arms wrapped around her, the comfort he felt with her in his hands—his hands. He saw them now in the flickering lantern light. Hard, callused. A killer’s hands. At first, he hadn’t wanted to hold Petty when she was an infant. This memory came to him, clear as spring water. He had been afraid that some of his evilness might invade her tiny body. But he sensed a change in himself the moment she was born, right in his very atoms. His arms, his hands, his entire body was changing in subtle ways in order to accept this sweet burden he’d been given. She fits perfectly in my hands, he remembered thinking when the doctor gave her to him. They have shaped themselves to her without my even knowing—

He let his daughter go. It was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. “Go, my Pet.”

“No!” the girl screamed, clutching at him.

The Big Thing chuckled, enjoying the touching family moment.

“We can accommodate two,” it said.

“You will have to take her,” Micah pleaded with Ebenezer and Minny. “Please.”

They grabbed his daughter’s arms. Her screams intensified as they dragged her away, legs kicking wildly. Ebenezer whispered something into her ear. At that, Petty stopped kicking. Her eyes shone in the dim, the brightest spots in the chamber.

“I love you, Daddy” was all she said.

“Blow me a kiss, darling.”

She did. He watched it float through the dark air, then reached out and snatched it. Micah put his daughter’s last kiss in his pocket. “Thank you, baby. I will need it.” They left him, Petty trembling, still disbelieving, her body limp as a wrung dishrag. Minerva followed her, stunned and softly weeping. Ebenezer was last; he departed with a terse but compassionate nod. The three of them crawled into the tunnel. The Big Thing followed them out, leaving Micah with its daddy.

Micah exhaled. He pulled himself together. He unbuttoned his shirt in the flickering glow of the lantern. The baby made gluttonous sucking sounds. His hand trembled as he stretched the skin of his stomach taut. Old flesh, wasn’t it? It had felt a lot, carried him through so much. It bore the nicks and scrapes of its service.

It is not an easy thing, stabbing oneself. Micah had scarcely considered how it ought to be done, never having harbored those thoughts. Fast and declarative seemed best. Cut fast, cut deep.

Micah heard the rope ladder banging against the rock as Petty and the other two climbed up it. Go on, baby. Keep going. Never look back.

He hissed through his teeth as the knife slid into his belly. He jerked the blade across in a straight and bitter line; his flesh readily opened up. He dropped to his knees, swooning as blood soaked into his waistband. Deep enough? He sensed the thing would have its own methods of opening him up.

A delicate touch on his shoulder. A red rope had descended from the ceiling to alight upon him. It wasn’t painful. The warmest kiss. He batted it away. That couldn’t happen yet. He had one final task to complete.

He dragged his bleeding body over to his backpack and rooted inside. His hands closed around the bricklike object he’d carried many miles. He pulled it out. The baby issued a quizzical burble.

Micah had purchased it from an acquaintance from his sad old, bad old days. He had purchased it before heading off to find Ebenezer, meeting the man in a parking garage and paying in cash. Such transactions should carry no trace. The man he had bought it from asked no questions regarding its usage—men like the seller made it their business to proffer product without moral consequence. He only told Micah that it was enough to do the trick, which had sounded about right to Micah.

He turned to the baby. Showed it what he was holding.

“I hope,” he said laboredly, “you are not afraid of enclosed spaces.”

“DADDY!” the Long Walker shrieked.

Petty—who was up the ladder by then, although her progress had been slowed by her tears—looked down at the thing, which stood at the bottom of the basin watching as they ascended. Pet was startled by the childish pitch of its voice. Its huge moonface was split in a rictus of rage—the expression of something that had been tricked most awfully.

It turned and fled back into the tunnel, its huge legs sawing through the dark air.

“Move,” Minny said to Petty. “As fast as you can, little girl.”

SEVEN STICKS OF TNT wired together in a bundle.

“How many seconds do you want me to rig the timer?”

This was the question the man Micah had bought it from had asked. A cheap plastic egg timer, the kind you’d find in kitchens all across America, was wired to the fuses and strapped to the dynamite with duct tape.

“Three seconds,” Micah told him.

“Three? Jesus, man. That’s not nearly enough time to run clear of the explosion. That’s barely enough time to blow your nose.”

“Three,” Micah said again.

Micah twisted the knob on the egg timer as the baby-thing watched him. He could sense its worry—though perhaps it was faking again? It began to hiss menacingly as it crawled toward him. In the lantern’s glow, Micah at last got a sense of its true shape: the light shone through its fatty covering to display a network of brachial and spiny limbs. It moved quickly, its nails clickety-clacking on the rock. Its voice filled his skull.

Oh no no don’t you dare do not DARE—

Micah could hear the other thing coming now, too. He pictured its mouth opened in a tortured leer as it raced through the tunnel to protect its precious father. It was getting closer, steaming toward him—

You had to be calm in the cut. That was the key. You had to hold your mud for that extra half second, even with the hammers of hell pounding down on you. Everything hubbed on that. It really did. If you acted too soon, you could lose it all.

The Big Thing tore into the chamber, its body billowing up and out to blot the lantern’s light. Micah waited until it was fully inside; then he hurled the TNT down the tunnel it had just vacated. He turned to face them. The baby’s fleshy face twisted in rage. The Big Thing stood rooted, momentarily perplexed. Micah opened his hands to them as blood sheeted down his stomach.

Sorry, fellas, but it had to be done.

Micah wore a blissful smile. He looked less threatening when he smiled. So much less the badass. Ellen always said he ought to smile more often. And right now he did. For her.

THE EXPLOSION ROARED out of the cavern. A hail of black dust and rock splinters shotgunned from the cleft to spray the sand in a wide radius.

Minerva and Eb and Petty were clear of the blast zone by then. They stood three abreast, staring gape-jawed as more dust and rubble sifted from the cavern. They could hear the rock giving way as the interior began to cave in.

“No,” Minerva whispered. “Micah, oh, Micah, what did you do?”

MICAH CAME TO some time later. He was still alive. It came as a shock. Not an entirely welcome one, under the circumstances.

The lantern continued to burn. Squinting, he could see it was partially covered in a coating of black, coal-like dust. Someone had scraped some of the dust off and relit it.

He saw chunks of stone on the floor, their jagged contours swimming in the light of the lantern. A fine haze of soot hung in the air. He looked down at himself. The edges of his gaping stomach wound were crusted with the same black soot. The ragged, bumpy edges looked like a dog’s gums. The smell of explosives was sharp in his nose.

But he was still alive. The chamber was still here. It had not caved in.

Naughty boy.

The voice sent a spike of panic through him.

You must be punished.

He rolled onto his side. The tunnel was gone—in its place a solid fall of rock, a few chunks of which had rolled across the chamber’s floor. So it had worked. He was dimly amazed that the cavern hadn’t collapsed around him. But this thing had immense power, so it was not absurd to think it had found a way to protect its lair from the blast. At least Micah had sealed them all inside.

He stood dazedly. He couldn’t see anything past the apathetic light shed by the lantern. He flinched as something touched his shoulder. A red rope had descended from the ceiling to lick at his flesh. He did not fight it this time. It felt too good. The ropes spooled down in great multitudes, all with shining inner cores. They attached to his flesh and gently lifted him up. He almost laughed—even as the blood sheeted down him. Such a delightful sensation. They held him in a loving embrace. He could not move. In that moment, he didn’t want to.

The lantern light fell upon the Big Thing, which had moved into a corner. It produced a flute, which it raised to its lips. The flute made no sound, but the Big Thing danced anyway, legs kicking and feet shuffling, happy in whatever way it could be.

The baby mewled somewhere behind Micah. It, too, had survived the blast. Of course it had. Micah heard it slapping closer to him, though he could not chart its approach.

A chill raced through his body when a cold tongue brushed his calf. He flinched, unable to help it. No, he thought. Do not get weak-kneed already. It will get worse. His eyes fell upon the Reverend’s body covered in a dusting of black soot. So much worse.

The Big Thing had stopped playing its flute. It seemed to bear Micah no ill will for the explosion that had trapped it here. Perhaps it could get out easily enough. Perhaps a few tons of blown-apart rock and a lack of breathable air meant nothing to it. The thing stared at him in the fluttering light.

“It must be said, you are strong,” it said in obvious appreciation. “Stronger than any of your kind we have encountered.”

The baby made a gargling rasp—a note of agreement? Something coiled around Micah’s ankle and constricted mercilessly.

“That does not matter, does it?” Micah asked.

The Big Thing shook its head almost sadly. “Time and pressure will split the strongest rock,” it said distantly. “In fact, time alone is sufficient.”

The baby slid between Micah’s spread legs. In the lantern’s light—which was now dying out, Micah noted with worry—it didn’t resemble a baby at all. It was much older and more unspeakable. His eyes couldn’t grasp the true shape of it, or didn’t want to; his gaze skated off its awfulness, shying from it like a nervous horse. It began to mount him. Micah moaned. He couldn’t help himself. The Big Thing retreated to the far side of the chamber. A chalice had been grooved into the rock. It folded its enormous body into that indentation, tucking its legs up to its chin. It closed its eyes and went still: a toy in a cupboard waiting for its owner to take it out and play with it again.

The lantern’s flame blew sideways, frayed by an unfelt wind. It would go out soon. Micah was terrified at the thought of being alone in the dark with this thing. The light made it slightly less maddening. Would he die when the air ran out? He hoped to God it would be so.

The thing had reached his knee now. Its body was wet and hard like a naked tendon. It made a snuffling noise that a dog might make rooting for scraps under a dinner table. This, too, almost made Micah laugh. Instead he cried. He realized he’d actually been doing this on and off for some time. It was of no matter. He could cry all he liked.

The flame whumphed and spluttered, the kerosene nearly gone. The thing was slipping inside of him now. It didn’t hurt so bad. The red ropes might have something to do with that. He didn’t dare look, but he could hear his insides shifting with a soft squelch. He took a few hiccuping inhales, the sort a boy makes before he dunks his head underwater to see how long he can hold his breath.

Oh God, he thought wildly. Please let them be safe. Please let them live without wondering, without too much burden, without without without—

The lantern’s light winked out. Darkness overtook him.

In that darkness, a voice:

Shall we begin?