Little Heaven

1

ELLEN SHUGHRUE reentered her own body at five minutes past ten on the morning her daughter returned home.

She would never remember the dream she was roused from. All that remained was a sense of darkness and the incessant fluttering of wings. And inside that swirling turbulence, her husband’s calm and ever-present voice:

Without without without…

She did not crack her eyelids. As usual, her eyes were already open. Ellen simply fled back into consciousness like a person flung out of a mine shaft. The sunlight streaming through the window was so powerful that she let out a pained hiss. She blinked—Mother of Christ, that hurt! Her eyelids grated against her eyeballs like fine-grit sandpaper, causing tears to flood down her cheeks. When was the last time she’d slept in late enough to have the sun wake her? It was her habit to be up before dawn. Had she had a few drinks with Micah last night? Her head throbbed like an abscessed tooth.

A wave of guilt swept over her: here she was lying in bed with a hangover while Petty was up and no doubt wondering why her mother was still lollygagging in bed. Didn’t they have something this morning? Ellen struggled to recall. A piano lesson, soccer practice, or—?

Her sister came into the bedroom. Sherri’s hands fluttered up to her mouth. Her eyes were wide with shock.

Something was wrong. Ellen realized this all at once. Her sister shouldn’t look that damn old. Sherri, she… Lord, she was an old biddy. Her sister’s hands were bony, the skin stretched tight over the bones. The fine lines at the edges of Sherri’s eyes had become deeply trenched crow’s-feet.

“Are you…,” Sherri said, awestruck. “Ellen, are you awake?”

Why the hell wouldn’t I be awake? I know I slept in a bit, but let’s not make a capital case out of it.

This was what Ellen was going to say. But when she tried to speak, her voice was a papery rasp. Her mouth was dry as dust. Her vocal cords felt rusty, a bit like an engine in a junkyard that had seized up from disuse.

She groaned and rolled onto her back. Oh! That hurt, too. Fuck a duck. She tried to sit up. Couldn’t. She nearly laughed—how weird. Her muscles were slack. She managed to lift her arm off the coverlet. She would have screamed, were she capable. Her arm was a fleshless stick—Christ, what the hell had happened to her? Who had stolen her life, her body?

“Calm down,” she heard Sherri saying. “It’s going to be okay.”

Hands shaking, Sherri picked up the phone on the dresser and worked the rotary dial.

“Doctor? It’s Sherri Bellhaven. She’s awake.” Shaking, nodding her head violently. “I don’t know—I just came in and she’s up. Okay, okay, okay-yup-yup-yup.”

She hung up. “The doctor’s going to be here soon. You need to keep your eyes open, El. Please, just keep your eyes open. Stay awake.”

What are you so worked up about? Ellen wanted to ask, resisting the urge to panic. I don’t feel the least bit tired. I’ve had a full night’s rest. The sleep of the damned, it feels like.

A twentysomething man came into the bedroom. Ellen wanted to snatch the covers up, feeling somehow naked, but her arms wouldn’t obey. The boy was handsome and trim with sandy hair. He was staring at her in disbelief.

“Aunt Ellen?”

No. It couldn’t be. Nate? Nate wasn’t old enough to drive a car or smoke cigarettes. This couldn’t be her nephew. It was someone else. An imposter. Someone was playing a filthy, mean-spirited trick on—

Ellen experienced a sickening whiplash sensation. Just how the hell long had she been asleep?

“The doctor wants you to sit up,” Sherri said. “Nate and me are going to help you up, okay? Now, this might hurt a little.”

Ellen managed to nod. Fear was crawling over her scalp now. Not fear of falling asleep—she wasn’t sure she’d ever fall asleep again—but fear at how much time was gone from her, this terrible sense of loss, of her life having been snatched away from her.

“What time is it?” she rasped at her sister. Then, suddenly terrified: “What day is it?”

Where’s Petty? Where’s Micah? Why weren’t they here?

Sherri gripped her right arm and shoulder; Nate gripped her left. As gently as they could, they sat her up and rested her against the headboard. The pain was monstrous. Her muscles were atrophied, her body horribly shrunken. She became aware of a fungal, unwashed smell; it took a few moments before she recognized it as her own. She boggled at the wrecked canvas of her body, the lower half of it mercifully hidden under the sheets.

Propped up, she could see out the window. The front yard with its barren flower beds. The sun glinted off the mailbox at the base of the long graveled drive. Squinting, she watched a car approach. A big bastard. Cadillac. Her chest jogged as she tried to laugh again. Had Micah bought himself a Caddy? That wasn’t like him at all. Next he’d be stepping out in rhinestone cowboy boots.

The car pulled into the driveway. Her heart took a funny hop as a vision flashed through her mind, impossible to grip—a premonition, the tarot card readers would call it.

Oh please, she thought as the car doors swung open. Oh please please…

MINERVA THREW THE TRANSMISSION into park. Petty remained asleep in the backseat. Her face was wrenched in a troubled expression, as if the girl was suffering through a night terror.

“Hey,” Minerva said, reaching back to give her a gentle shake. “Thanks for giving us directions. We’re home now, honey.”

The girl woke up. Her face smoothed out, serene. She rubbed her eyes and sat up.

“I was dreaming.”

“Oh yes?” Ebenezer said. “Not a pleasant dream?”

She stared at him in confusion. “I don’t remember.”

“Could be that’s your good fortune, my dear.”

The three of them sat in the car with the engine ticking down.

“Thank you,” Petty said finally. “For coming to get me.”

They opened the doors and stepped out. The day was warm, considering the season. Petty walked toward the house in bare feet, the hem of her nightgown swishing around her ankles.

“Are you coming?”

Ebenezer said, “In a minute, dear. You go on in. You have been missed.”

Petty turned back to the house. “Hey,” Minerva called to her. “You know how much your father loves you, don’t you?”

The girl turned again, and nodded. “Where is he?”

Minerva wondered if she was already forgetting, the same way Minerva had heard the survivors of Little Heaven had forgotten. Could be so. Maybe that was the best and only way of soldiering on.

“He’s coming, I’m sure,” Minerva said, meeting Petty’s questioning gaze directly. Was it a lie or a hopeful truth? She had no idea.

Minerva and Ebenezer walked toward the house in tandem.

She said, “You figure that was his intention all along?”

“Micah, you mean?” said Eb. “To have it just be him?”

She nodded. Ebenezer kicked a pebble.

“I have no idea. His aims weren’t always easy to assess.”

“He did save us.”

“Yes.”

“You figure we’re worth saving?”

Eb smiled. “Not really. But maybe he thought so. And his daughter was at stake, too.”

He was limping badly. Minerva slowed down to let him keep pace. “Do you think he’s dead?” she asked.

“After all that? I can’t see how it could be otherwise.” Ebenezer went silent a moment. “I hope so. I… I’ll pray it was so.”

Minerva nodded. “I don’t know if I can just leave him back there, though, Eb. Not without knowing for sure.”

Now it was Eb’s turn to nod. “Yes. We may have to go back. I cannot believe I’m saying that, but… Ellen might force the issue.”

“If she ever wakes up.”

“Yes. If.”

“I think I can die now,” Minerva said suddenly. “I feel it, you know? Of any old thing. A bloody nose. A bee sting.”

“So does that mean you want to die, milady?”

She turned her face up to the sky. The sun was uncommonly bright today.

“I’m gonna have to think about it.”

He clapped her on the back. “Think long and hard, my dear.”

PETTY STEPPED INTO the bedroom.

Oh, my little girl was all Ellen could think. Oh, my baby, where have you gone?

Petty threw herself on the bed. She grabbed Ellen fiercely around her threadbare waist.

Gentle, baby girl. Your old mom’s not the woman she once was.

“Where have you been, Mom?” Petty asked.

“Where have I been?” Ellen croaked, noticing the dirtied hem of her daughter’s nightgown “Where have you been?”

They shared a look, one that said, I don’t know where I’ve been. But I’m so happy to be back.

Sherri and Nate stood with gobsmacked grins on their faces. Ellen’s gaze carried over to the window. Two figures were walking up the drive. She recognized them dimly—she had the sense of knowing them from long ago, as friends perhaps… although soldiers was the word that skated across her mind. These were people she had been in some terrible battle with, the exact nature of which she could no longer recall. The woman turned her face up to the sky to drink in the sunlight. She smiled and said something to the man, who patted her on the back hard enough to raise a plume of dust off her clothing.

“Put my arm around you, Pet,” she said. “I can’t lift it at the moment.”

Petty took her mother’s arm and draped it over her shoulder. It lay there like a bit of driftwood. It was okay. The feeling would come back eventually. Only one thing was missing.

Come back to me, Micah. For Christ’s sake, you come back.

It came to her then. A second premonition, but much worse this time. A hellish snapshot from her buried past, walled off behind an impenetrable barrier her mind had constructed to keep it from doing any further harm.

A black rock. A monolithic buzzing. The spiteful laughter of children. And a presence deep within that rock, cold and vile and relentless—

She recoiled. Then she began to cry. The sobs wracked her frame in painful waves, but she was unable to stop. She hadn’t cried with such ardency since she was a girl.

“What’s the matter, Mom?” she heard Pet say.

“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”

2

HELL IS A BOX.

Micah hung in emptiness. No top or bottom. All darkness.

He had surrendered all memory of his body. Eventually he would surrender everything else, too. His sanity, his humanity, even his name. This certainty rested easily within him.

Dypaloh. 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.

He tried to hang on to this, among a few other things. That image—a house made of dawn—and the shape of his wife’s mouth and the warmth of his daughter’s body pressed to his. But it was so goddamn hard. It was all fading, all failing, taking him with it.

What do we truly know of hell?

The thing nested contently within him. It… pulled. A slow, remorseless withdrawal. Sometimes he tried to fight back. Not physically, as he had irrevocably lost that control. But he would wall off his mind and think at it. Think good thoughts, affirming ones. The thing seemed to enjoy Micah’s feistiness. Time alone will split the strongest rock.

While his mind was still intact, Micah dwelled. Such was some men’s nature, as it was his. He reflected that this thing inside of him called out to evil men—or it called out to the evilness in men, which was essentially the same thing. It drew in those like Augustus Preston and Amos Flesher; perhaps over the course of its history, it had drawn dozens more. And now, it had drawn Micah into its web.

What did that mean? Was Micah as evil as those others had been? There was abundant evidence to support that argument. He had killed his fellow man without mercy and at times without cause. Old men, young men… yes, even children.

And yet.

And yet…

Dypaloh. House made of dawn. My father’s house has many rooms, each more splendorous than the last. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so—

It’s all so goddamn fragile. Your life and the thread you carry it on. And the more love you carry, the more stress you put on that thread, the better chance it will snap. But what choice do any of us have? You take on that love because to live without it is to exist as half a person. You give that love away because it is in you to give, not out of a desire for recompense. And you keep loving even when the world cracks open and reveals a black hole where all that love can get swallowed.

He had a sense of the thing inside of him now. It was distilled evil. Vast, unknowable. But it was elementally itself, as it had always been. The wasp stings. The jackal bites. That is the nature of those creatures, just as evil was this thing’s nature. Could anything be faulted for its nature?

I forgive you, he sometimes thought. This angered the thing to no end. It would shift within him, sending out needlefish of pain. But it was worth it.

Other times, he was able to cast his mind out of the black rock. Only for a few seconds before the thing caught him and reeled him back; it had become harder to do the more the thing fed upon him. In time, he would not be able to do it at all. But for now—if he marshaled all his will—he was still able to make that flight.

He pictured it as a jump. He coiled and sprang. His unconscious fled out of his body, up through the black rock to its peak. It was like swimming up through suffocating oil. He broke through into the clean sunshine, fresh air, birds trilling…

…and he could hear her.

Petty. His daughter. He could hear her—the wild, reckless laughter of youth. And whatever was left of him swelled to bursting.

Was evil a static commodity? He wondered this, too. Perhaps there was no more or less evil on earth now than there had ever been. It was like any other element. You could not manufacture any more of it than already existed. It got passed around from body to body, from death to new life. We all inherited a little bit of it. He had seen plenty of it. In the eyes of the men he’d fought beside in the war and in the eyes of the men he’d killed afterward… He’d seen it in his own eyes in the mirror. This being the case, perhaps it was not possible to erase evil from the lives of those you care for. All you could hope to do was divert it away from your loved ones, focusing it on another, equally profound evil. Failing that, you take it on yourself. Take that bullet, even if you have to take it for a hundred years.

Evil was fundamentally weak. Micah understood that now. It was cowardly and dreary and it sought the darkest spaces between the beams to make its home.

I forgive you for what you are, he thought at the thing.

Needlefish. Needlefish.

Still worth it.

Micah Shughrue hung in emptiness, curling the remains of his mind around the sound of his daughter’s laughter, defending it like a mother bear protecting her cub in the deepest, blackest reaches of her den. Sooner or later the thing would snatch this from him as well—he could already feel it slipping through his fingers, and with it the most essential element of his soul—but until then he would nurse it, bite and claw and scrape to keep hold of it.

My name is Micah Shughrue, he thought. I have sinned, I have committed great awfulness, but I am loved. I live with my wife and daughter in a house made of dawn. The house is made of pollen and rain and laughter…

pollen and rain…

and rain…

rain…