Little Heaven

1

THEY PASSED THROUGH several villages unseen and unheard, skirting settlements like coyotes on the lope. The Long Walker carted Petty Shughrue swiftly over great distances. She wondered what had become of the preacher back at the carnival. How badly did the townspeople hurt him? The Long Walker hadn’t even seemed all that delighted when those men started to beat the preacher down. It had actually looked bored.

The Long Walker carried them up a hillside and across the narrow spine of a ridge. Petty could not help but notice how the plants wilted wherever the thing passed. A trail of death.

The ridge fed down to a grassy valley. A faint prickling of light between the trees. They came upon an isolated shack. Smoke spindled from a flue in its roof. Firelight cut between the chinking of its logs. Skins were tacked to hide stretchers near the door.

The Long Walker’s posture was loosey-goosey, shoulders rounded forward and head hanging between its shoulders. Its fingers twitched at the ends of its hands as if in search of some more spirited pursuit.

“Is someone out there?” came a man’s voice from inside the shack. “I can hear you.”

From inside, there came the popping of knots in the fire. After that, the unmistakable cocking back of a shotgun’s hammers.

“I will ask once more. Then I must assume you mean to cause harm. Who the hell is out there?”

Finally, the Long Walker opened its mouth—its terrible, skull-spanning mouth. In the moonlight, Petty could see its insides: the soft, pulpy flesh of a toothless infant.

“It is your mother, Cedric Finnegan Yancy!” the Long Walker cried in a voice that could not be its own—this was the shrill tone of a woman. “Will you not come out to greet me?”

Silence. Then a trembling voice: “That ain’t you, Ma. You’re dead, God rest your soul. You been dead eight years now.”

“And whose fault is that?” the Long Walker said, its lips spreading in a corrosive grin. “Who left his mother when she was just getting sick? Whose departure quickened his mother’s path to the grave?”

When the man finally replied, it was in a tone of disbelief. “What devil lurks past my door?”

“Devil?” The Long Walker laughed. “Devil! Ha! My own son, flesh of my flesh. Come outside, boy. Apologize to your mother. For your sins are plentiful, as we both know. The whoring we may set aside, for what man has not fallen afoul of the pleasures of the flesh? But to leave your own mother, who cradled you and kissed your scraped knees—to leave her alone to die? This, my son, is a sin most unforgivable.”

“They sent me to ’Nam!” the man shrieked. “I was given no choice in the matter!”

“I died in pain greater than you could imagine.” The Long Walker spoke in a crooning singsong. “My body rotted from the inside. The sawbones cut my tits off—the same tits you latched to as an infant to suckle and bite—yes, bite, for you were a cruel nurser. Where did the doctor toss my diseased old tits? To the dogs, for all I know. Nobody was there to speak for me. My husband dead, my ungrateful son gone and run off. I screeched and bled night after night. Nobody cared. Nobody came to help me.”

“Please.” The man’s voice was choked, pleading. “Ma, please.”

“My cunty rotted out, Cedric,” the Long Walker said matter-of-factly. “Everything that had gone off inside of me came right out, slicker than snot on a doorknob. But it was sloooooow. It took months. I lay there for hours in my own shit and ruin. I died alone, all alone.”

A thundering BOOM!—

A ragged hole punched through the shack door, splinters spitting in every direction. Lead shot whizzed past mere inches from Petty’s ear, so close that it sent her hair fluttering.

The Long Walker advanced. The door opened without it even touching the handle, as if blown open by a mammoth gust of wind. The Long Walker’s body expanded, the flaps of its duster billowing, then shrank again to fit through the doorway. It dragged Petty inside with it.

The shack was lit by a kerosene lantern. A fire guttered in a potbellied stove. Animal skins cured on the walls. The man was big and self-sufficient by the looks of it, with a graying beard. He was jacking shells into his double-barreled shotgun as the Long Walker came in.

“Oh God,” the man said, dropping the gun. “Oh no…”

He curled up in the corner and covered his face with his hands and shook. He had lived in these inhospitable woods with the howling of wind and wolves, yet he had been reduced to a child at the mere sight of this thing.

“Go away,” he pleaded. “Please just go away.”

The creature seemed even bigger within these confines, its milky skull brushing the roof. A coldness wept off its body, particular to creatures that live at the bottom of the ocean. It crossed the shack, passing the man where he sat mewling, to a tool rack on the wall. Knives and other sharp implements for the flensing, puncturing, and skinning of animal carcasses.

The Long Walker selected one seemingly at random—but Petty could tell that this thing never acted randomly. Its every gesture served some terrible purpose. The knife was fingerling thin. The blade was pitted and rusty, but its edge was sharp—and it became keener, more glittery, when the thing took possession of it, as though the Long Walker’s touch conferred a deeper refinement of its purpose. The Long Walker ran the edge along its fingers. The blade slit its tissue cleanly, but no blood welled: its flesh was flawless porcelain clean through to whatever bone might have lurked at its core.

“Vivisection,” it said. “Is this word familiar to you, my Pet?”

Petty shook her head. The Long Walker flirted the blade over its fingers.

“Oh yes,” it said. “Sometimes it is the only way.”

The Long Walker hunched before her with its arms hugged round its knees, the knife’s tip touching the oiled dirt floor. Its posture did almost nothing to change the sweeping size of its body. Its eyes were very strange indeed. To Petty they resembled Christmas tree ornaments but darker, more secretive—and she could see things moving behind them, their shadows held by the lamp.

“To know something—to truly know that thing—you must open that thing up.”

The man continued to moan. More than anything in the world, Petty wanted to run away, to run and keep running even if that meant she would be alone in the woods. She had an overwhelming sense that the Long Walker was going to show her things soon. Open her eyes to wonderments she could go several lifetimes without ever knowing.

“The only way to understand anything is to see what makes it tick.” The Long Walker exposed its toothless gums. “Tick. Tick. Tick.” It held the knife by its handle and let the blade swing side to side like the pendulum on a clock. “To see how those things fit together, yes? To expose the soft and delicate parts.”

“You already know how they fit together,” said Petty.

The Long Walker shook its head. “Each is subtly different, my Pet. And it is these subtleties that intrigue.”

She could see that it was excited for what was to come. Its skin jumped with anticipation. Yet mixed in with that excitement was a strain of deep tiredness, as if it had done this exact thing so often that the act had long ago surrendered any enjoyment. Seeing this, Petty felt a weird pity for the thing.

Wretchedly, the man asked: “Am I in hell?”

The Long Walker hung its head between its shoulders. The knife moved from one of its hands to the other, never stopping, as if the blade was white-hot to the touch.

“Hell is a box,” it said to the man. “Yes, it is. Hell is a box not much bigger than your own body. It is dark inside the box, and cold, but the encasement is thin—so thin that you can almost convince yourself that you can break out if you only tried. You cannot feel anything inside this box. But you can hear and… sense, to a certain extent. Outside of that box is everyone you ever loved. All the people you have cared for and who care for you. And they are in agony. You cannot touch them. They are screaming, calling for you—your name is always upon their lips. And you cannot go to them or comfort them in any way. And that is your hell, friend. Hell is a box.”

The knife’s handle danced along its knuckles, a neat trick. The shadows thickened and the lamp’s light bled low.

“What I have for you is not hell,” the Long Walker told the man. “But for a brief while, it may feel something like it.”

2

THEY DROVE EAST in the lightening day. Micah had rented a Cadillac Coupe DeVille. White leather seats, mahogany dash, A/C, crimson trim, quadraphonic stereo system with an eight-track player. Its big-bore V-8 purred. It wasn’t the sort of vehicle he would normally drive, but it suited his doomsday demeanor. No use saving for a rainy day when your days were numbered.

“You never moved far away, did you?” Minerva said from the backseat.

Micah said, “It is where we settled. Ellen wanted it.”

“That close? Practically living in the shadow of it?”

Micah said, “Somebody had to.”

They followed the road, letting it pull them back to the source. It felt almost like driving back through time: the last fifteen years washing away, putting them right where they had been… except they were older and more worn out and much more frightened than they had been all those years ago. They drove in silence for the most part, not listening to the radio even though the car speakers were top-of-the-line. The odometer clicked off the miles to Grinder’s Switch. They arrived early in the afternoon.

They pulled into the same gas station where they had stocked up on provisions fifteen years ago.

“I’ll wait here,” Eb said, stretching his bum leg out in the backseat.

“Get you anything?” Micah asked.

“A few bottles of Yoo-hoo, for consistency’s sake.”

Micah stepped into the store with Minerva. It looked remarkably as it had, apart from the addition of two video game cabinets beside the newspaper racks: Asteroids and Pac-Man. Micah watched the little yellow character like a pie with a wedge cut out of it racing round its maze, wakka-wakka-wakka-wakka. What was the point? Ah God, he was old. A fogey. Petty had asked for an Atari system not long ago. Micah said he didn’t want to see her wasting her time. But it was the duty of the young to waste their time, seeing as they had so much of it.

The man behind the counter was the same from years ago. He looked roughly a thousand years old. He wore dentures that pushed his lips apart, and his nose had been broken since Micah last set eyes on him. Micah bought Eb’s Yoo-hoos, some wooden matches, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of Wonder Bread. The clerk totaled up his purchases sullenly and put them in a paper sack. Minerva bought a quart of Dr Pepper and two Milky Ways.

They returned to the car. Micah drove to the cut. The old trail was still there. Micah popped the trunk. They unloaded their gear: a rifle, sleeping gear, a lantern, and flashlights. Minerva handed Micah his backpack from the trunk. Its weight surprised her.

“What you got in there, Shug? Pet rocks?”

They shouldered their packs and made their way through the long grass to the head of the trail. They had to move slower on account of Ebenezer’s limp.

The sun hung above the western hills, shining with a dull glow that cast no shadows. The air was still, but a sweet breath came from the woods rowing the hillside: a mild note of camphor. The twittering of birds, too: only a few, but at least some animals were about. The path followed a gradual rise. They could spot no signs of the old fire. Everything was thriving, in fact.

Minerva twisted the cap off her Dr Pepper. Ebenezer broke into a commercial jingle as he limped along.

“I drink Dr Pepper, don’t you see,” he sang in a redneck twang, “as it’s the perfect taste for meeeee…”

“Whatever you paid for singing lessons, it was too much,” said Minerva.

The two of them needled each other simply to hear themselves talk—anything to push away the silence, which had become heavier as they forged deeper into the woods.

They stopped for a rest. The woods did not feel quite as hostile as they had fifteen years ago. Had they actually hurt the thing back then? Micah could not credit that. He wasn’t sure something like that could be injured or killed because he was unsure if it was truly alive. But more than that, it just seemed so ineffably old that, whenever Micah turned his mind to it (which was not often, because even his thoughts scared him), notions of it ever dying seemed farcical. Something like that existed outside the bounds of time and scale—outside human bounds, anyway, and those were the only measurements he could apply.

“Are we ever going to talk about that part of it?” Minerva said. She must have read something in Micah’s face.

“What part?” said Eb.

“Whatever happened down there in the dark.”

“With the…?” Eb started.

“Yeah, the…”

Minerva trailed off. It was hard to say what, exactly, they had been given. Wishes? Is that what happened? Had they been granted wishes, like the old story about the genie in its bottle?

“‘The Monkey’s Paw,’” Eb said.

Minerva nodded. “You read it?”

“A few times,” said Eb. “Seems rather apt.”

“But what…” Minerva grimaced, her brow beetling. “What did we ask for? I don’t remember saying anything. More just something kinda bubbling up from way down inside me. Something I must have wanted real bad. And that fucking thing granted it.”

“Mine’s not so hard to figure,” Eb said. “I wished to see the face of God.”

Ebenezer wiped his nose on his sleeve and took a sip of Yoo-hoo. He stared at them imploringly, as if hoping the other two would understand—intimately, in their marrow, knowing the way he knew. Ebenezer had been so desperately scared. Those moments, in that place beneath the world, had nearly broken him… or had broken him, in a way he was unable to unravel or give voice to or properly grapple with. Like a greenstick fracture of some invisible bone—a vestigial one, the bones we all had as children that fused and changed so that, as adults, we have a different number of them in our bodies. That phantom bone went snap. The cleave was clean and flawless, as if a surgeon had done the work with a bone hammer. And that little bone was unhealable—it was forever broken, the jagged ends grinding together inside his mind. Looking back, Ebenezer was unsure that human minds were built to cope with any of… of what happened down there. He felt no shame thinking that, either, as he did not believe humans were built to come to grips with anything that existed beyond their conventional means of reckoning. When humans experience something that challenges their fundamental belief of the world—its reasonableness, its fixed parameters—well, their minds crimp just a bit. A mind folds, and in that fresh pleat lives a darkness that cannot be explained or accounted for. So they ignore that pleat as best they can—it, and the darkness it holds. But it’s always there, always seeking redress.

“I wanted to see the face of God,” Eb said again. “I must have. I was not a religious person, as you both know. I killed for money. But in that moment, all I wanted was to know there was something larger than myself up there—a benevolent god to protect me. If not my body, at least my immortal soul.”

The men turned to Minerva. She spat into the nettles. Why even speak the words? They must know what she’d asked for: I will never be killed by the hand of a man. Minerva could not say that was her exact wish—she was still unsure, then as now, as to the precise compass of her desires. But look at her now. The past fifteen years. The Sharpening, that most terrible gift. She could kill and not be killed, even by her own hand, much as she might now pray for death. What worth were those prayers? She had made a deal with something as powerful, if earthbound, as any god. Perhaps it was a god of some sort. A dark one. An ancient one. But yes, she must have wished to be cleansed of the fear and anxiety she had once carried into life-or-death encounters. As Micah had said years back, she was not cool in the cut. Her hands always took fright, fluttering like startled chickadees. Minerva figured that was what the vile thing had dredged up. It found that flaw in her, one that shook her straight to her core, and whispered: Oh, my ladylove, my dove, I will make it all better. And it had, hadn’t it? As sure as eggs is eggs. But it had played a dirty trick, too. Well, fuck a duck. You couldn’t expect a thing like that to play fair, could you?

The light was fading between the firs. An owl hooted from a low bough.

“And you, Shug?” Minerva said. “What did you get?”

“Only everything I asked for.”

THEY HIKED UNTIL DUSK. Ebenezer hissed every time he set his foot down. Minerva felt no sympathy for him.

A shape broke through the trees ahead. They checked their strides, approaching cautiously. A solitary shack. Smoke spindled from its chimney. The door was ajar. Light from a potbellied stove threw flickering shadows across its interior.

From inside, there came an ominous sound. Minerva envisioned someone sitting on a whoopee cushion filled with thinned lard: a wet spluttering.

We don’t have to look, she thought edgily. We can walk right on by…

Too late. Micah toed the door open. His eyes fell upon something inside. His knees buckled; he leaned heavily against the door frame. The spluttering sounds were much louder with the door open.

In the firelight flickering through the door, Micah’s face was drawn and haunted. He drew a shuddering breath, then stepped into the shack. Ebenezer hesitantly followed, and quickly saw whatever Micah had beheld.

“I can’t,” Eb said, shaking his head violently. “Oh Christ, no, I can’t, I cannot—”

Borne on a sudsy foam of dread, Minerva advanced to the door. She didn’t want to see, either. But she couldn’t not bear witness.

The cramped shack reeked of blood. The stove, a folding card table, pelts tacked on the walls. Something hung among those pelts—much larger than the coyote and muskrat skins, oh yes. And it was still moving. A paralyzing chill spread down her back, as if liquid nitrogen had been injected into her spinal column.

A man was tacked to the wall. His bare feet kicked weakly six inches above the ground. He had been opened up, his chest split down the middle starting at the level of his clavicles. The skin was peeled back in quivering wings that had been pinned to the log walls with pelt tacks. The silverskin and fascia and yellow adipose tissues had been flensed away with clinical skill; whoever had done it had great facility with a boning knife. The man’s arms and legs had been slit down their middles, the skin peeled back to reveal the shining bone of femur and kneecap and humerus.

Humerus? Minerva thought, her mind taking a sickening lurch. There’s not a damn thing humerus here—hey-o! Gimme a rim shot, Doc Severinsen!

The flesh was slit back from his nose in petals, the strips tacked to the wood. The musculature of his face twitched, his eyes massive without anything to cover them; they peered around with a vaudevillian shock that forced a cascade of giddy giggles to bubble up Minerva’s throat. It was the only way to get rid of the chest-splintering pressure building up inside of her.

It took a moment to grasp the final horror. The source of that spluttering.

The man’s neck had been slit, but he was still breathing. The man’s lungs heaved, forcing breaths out, the air blllpphhphhph-ing from his severed windpipe. Minerva watched the erratic beat of his heart through the naked bones of his ribs; his innards still pushed stubborn shreds of food along.

What infernal sorcery was keeping him alive? Was it the same that kept her own heart beating every time she tried to off herself?

She grabbed a hatchet from the wall rack. She took two steps toward the man and brought it around in a wicked arc. It buried in the man’s neck, widening the slit. His body thrashed, blood spraying. She pried the blade out of the wall and swung it again and again until the man’s head was completely separated from his body: it hit the floor and rolled under the table like a lopsided bowling ball.

Minerva stared at Micah, breathing hard. Her face was flecked with blood.

“Merciful,” Micah said after a span.

Noise from under the table. The man—no, the head—was laughing. The gibbering sounds of lunacy you might hear at a nuthatch.

That laughter unseated something in Minerva—it filled her with panic and sorrow and, yes, rage. She kicked over the table and swung the hatchet at the giggling head. The blade cleaved the skull dead center, splitting the bone; there came a hiss as pressure forced a chunk of gray matter through. Minerva threw the stove open and hurled the head inside with the hatchet still embedded in it. The head continued to howl laughter, and the pitch ascended as its lips began to melt. Minerva slammed the stove door. Fire flared behind it; there came a small explosion as the juices inside the man’s head heated up, blowing out part of his skull. The giggling ceased.

They gathered outside. Ebenezer collapsed against a fallen log.

“How?” he asked helplessly.

“It’s the work of that thing.” Minerva was doubled over, breathing in huge gulps. “The Big Thing. The Piper. Whatever you want to call it.”

The smoke rising from the chimney now had a meaty smell.

“I don’t know if I can go through with this,” Minerva said. “I thought I could, Shug, but…”

“I understand.”

“I’m scared.”

“I understand.”

LATER, MICAH WALKED from the fire they had stoked a ways from the cursed shack. He stared through the trees in the direction of Little Heaven. They weren’t far now. It would all come to an end of sorts. He was ready for that. He had one last fight in him—and if he had to, he would fight alone. Petty was his blood; in the end tally, neither Minerva nor Ebenezer owed him a debt. Their ledgers were clean with him.

But Petty—yes, he owed her. A parent always does. He stared into the formless dark, and a memory molded itself within it. Petty was young at the time, two or three years old. This was before Ellen entered her endless sleep. But that day she wasn’t with them; it had been Micah and his daughter, alone. He’d been working in the paddocks when he spotted a caterpillar—a big brown one wriggling along, doing its caterpillary thing. He called Petty over and drew her attention to it.

“Touch it,” he said. “It is… fuzzy.”

Micah simply wanted her to feel the soft, bristling, undulating little carpet of fuzz that is a caterpillar. Pet put her finger on it and pressed down. She wasn’t big in human terms, but to a caterpillar she was gargantuan. The caterpillar curled into a ball. He snatched Pet’s hand away. “Gentle.” She gazed at him with no comprehension. Micah thought the caterpillar would be okay—it had just turtled up defensively. It would uncurl once the threat was gone. But the wind picked up and blew the caterpillar across the boards, light as a dried seedpod, in a way that told Micah the life had drained out of it. It happened so quickly. A thing was alive; next it was dead. Petty lost interest and ran off after her ball. Micah stared at the caterpillar a long time. It was the first thing his daughter had killed that he was aware of. Micah had guided her to the act. And yet life went on. It always did. Pet was chasing a ball. The birds were singing. The horses nickered in their stables.

You tell yourself it’s just a caterpillar. The world’s full of them. Which is true. But the world is full of us, too. And any of us can be lost—or taken—at any minute.

Micah thought about endings. Some were abrupt, like the way that caterpillar’s life had ceased. Some took longer, and you could see them coming from miles off. In so many ways, Micah wanted it to end. He felt every one of his years. He was old and bone-weary. His body ached; his mind was plagued. Everything he loved had been ripped from him, and he deserved it. Guilt and regret were different qualities, yes, but still tightly wed. You could not outrun your past. Your history was a lonely hound pursuing you over field and fallow, never resting, always hungry, tracking you relentlessly until one night you heard its nails scratching at your door.

I am coming, Pet, he thought. Please just hold on a little longer. If I can, you can.