Little Heaven

1

High-Alert Bulletin from the New Mexico State Forestry, October 21, 1966:

Excerpt from US Department of Agriculture Report: “Black Lands Fire Summary,” published January 15, 1967:

The Black Lands fire was believed to have been started by a lightning strike in the Black Mountain Wilderness Area on the evening of October 21, 1966; suppression activities were initiated by US Forest Service firefighters based in Lincoln National Forest. The fire raged through that night and the day following, aided by high winds that lifted embers beyond the initial fire line, leading to a catastrophic blaze that claimed a total of 53,890 acres (36,922 on Lincoln National Forest, 4,355 on Mescalero Apache tribal land, 3,002 of New Mexico land, and the remainder on private land), plus 354 private dwellings and 43 larger structures.

Primary entities involved in responding to the fire were the US Forest Service, Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, Lincoln County Office of Emergency Services, and the State of New Mexico (NM).

Somewhat strangely, the town on the southern edge of the Black Mountain range—a small village, Grinder’s Switch—was left unscathed. The fire burned down the eastern and southern flanks of the range, crossing a wide river running through the lowlands, but failed to reach Grinder’s Switch.

No emergency workers perished fighting the blaze. But several civilian casualties were later reported; the documented circumstances of those fatalities can be found in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Reports G-55A and G-55B, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Dossiers 0-99[A-G], which are available to authorized personnel upon approval.

News Item from the Clovis (NM) News Journal, October 23, 1966:

Tragedy appears to have struck an isolated religious compound located in the Black Mountain Wilderness Area.

The compound—dubbed Little Heaven by its overseer, the Reverend Amos Flesher, most recently of San Francisco—sat in the hills of the Black Mountain range. The compound was accessible via an access road or a secondary footpath that wound up through the hills.

Information remains spotty in the wake of the Black Lands fire, which emergency crews continue to battle in the southernmost reaches of the state. The compound burned in the fire, along with tens of thousands of neighboring acreage. Details emerging in the aftermath come from the remaining eyewitnesses—the children of Little Heaven, who appear to have been rescued by an unknown Good Samaritan or Samaritans.

The children arrived in the town of Grinder’s Switch yesterday, in the early-morning hours. They showed up in a specialized vehicle that had been used to transport goods and equipment to the compound. The unidentified driver left the vehicle at the Grinder’s Switch police station, where a single constable, William Jeffers, was on duty. The driver and any confederates were gone before Jeffers could confirm their identities.

According to Jeffers, the children were in a state of shock. He was unable to get much out of them about their ordeal.

“Only one of them had anything to say,” said Jeffers. “A girl, six or so, name as yet unconfirmed. She said they were all dead. The grown-ups. When I asked how, she said the Reverend killed them all. Every one.”

It is unclear if this witness’s story is factual or the product of shock. Nor is it yet known exactly how many people resided at Little Heaven.

The News Journal will diligently update this story as details emerge.

Letter postmarked December 15, 1968. Old Ditch, Arizona:

From “Little Heaven’s Prisoners” (as published in Esquire magazine, January 1970) by Chris Packer:

“He was a devious worm.”

Sister Muriel Hanratty remembers Amos Flesher all too well. His birdlike eyes. His fleshy lower lip. The pale strip of flab that ballooned between his waistband and the bottom of his shirts, which were always a size too small.

His nasty habits.

“He was a fiddler,” she tells me in the atrium of the Wooded Nook Rest Home outside of San Francisco. “Not a violinist,” she clarifies archly. “He touched himself. All the boys did, of course. No stopping that. You could cut their dirty sticks off and they’d still play with them, surely to Christmas. But there’s your garden-variety pawing and then there’s fiddling. It’s a wonder he didn’t whittle the thing away like a bar of soap in the shower, that’s how much he twiddled with it.”

At eighty-seven years old, Sister Muriel isn’t one for niceties. But I have little doubt that she was always a straight shooter. She worked at the San Francisco Catholic Orphanage for fifty years, until its doors shut for good. Budget cuts, Muriel says. A few of the other nuns were moved to Wooded Nook with her, but they have since passed on. She misses them, she says, as well as her time at the orphanage.

But not Amos Flesher. Him she does not miss one bit.

“He poked kids until they bled,” she tells me. “We had a ward full of boys and girls who were soft-headed. Our Children of God. The purest, most open smiles. We put Amos in charge of them during naptime. Amos was old enough; he ought to sing for his supper, we figured. Well, he stuck those poor kids. With a darning needle or a big pin. Most of them were restrained; it’s terrible, but it was for their own good. I started to see blood on their jammies. Their bums, their thighs. First I thought it was bedbugs. But it went on a while. I never caught him doing it. Amos was a sly boy. I don’t know that I’d call him smart—cunning is the word I’d use. Why would he want to hurt those poor children?” She shook her head. “When I heard about what happened out in the woods, I thought: Amos Flesher went and got himself a whole camp full of soft-brains so he could stick them all with pins. He was bloody-minded, Amos Flesher was. Bloody as anyone I’ve known.”

Bloody-minded. It would seem so. In the three years that have passed since the Little Heaven fire (it is properly known as the Black Lands fire, but hardly anyone refers to it by that name), precious little is known about the circumstances preceding it. No adult from Little Heaven lived to tell the tale, including Amos Flesher himself; the children who survived can recall very little of their experience. By the time I was able to arrange interviews with some of them—navigating a web of protective caretakers and foster parents and aunts and uncles—their stories held little in common. It would seem that their minds have embarked on a purposeful act of erasure. They can remember almost nothing, which is likely for the best.

About all that links their stories is a thread of stark, almost unimaginable terror. They talk about seeing their parents covered in blood—flashbulb memories, these searing mental images—though they can no longer recall how that happened. They’ve surrendered the connective tissue between these vivid recollections, the necessary bridgework. One girl talked about “a dark place where a dead baby wouldn’t stop crying.” Noises in the woods. A ghostly giant with the black eyes of a doll. The stuff of childhood nightmares, all of it. The kids’ minds and memories seem to be playing tricks on them, putting the faces of imaginary boogeymen on horrors too real to cope with—the evil of men. The evil of their own mothers and fathers, just maybe.

Survivor trauma, the shrinks call it.

Fire is the grand reducer. The heat of a forest fire can reach 2,672 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to melt carbon steel. Little Heaven disappeared in the most conclusive way: it burned, carbonized, and drifted away on the wind. Every structure, every body, everything. Gone. There is no way to sift the leavings and make much sense of what happened there. Only questions remain. Were they all dead already when the fire swept over the hillside? If so, how? If not, why didn’t they flee when the fire began to burn down upon them? They would have had time to abandon everything and run. They might have even made it out at a brisk walk, had they seen the fire early enough.

But that didn’t happen. Every adult died—or if not, they are nowhere to be found. They have not resurfaced anywhere and have yet to reclaim their children. The only sane reasoning is that they are gone. The hows and whys may never be known.

“I hope he’s burning in hell,” Sister Muriel says when I ask after the fate of Reverend Amos Flesher. She has a highly developed sense of divine retribution, and she lets it be known that God would not have it any other way. “Sure as I have breath in my body, that boy is roasting in the fiery pit. I hope the Devil gives him a few extra pokes with his pitchfork for me. Evil little bastard. The dirty fiddler.”

Letter postmarked June 8, 1969. Girdler, Kentucky:

2

MICAH FOUND ELLEN AGAIN, just as he said he would. And she was sure he’d come, though it took longer than she would have liked. She had made him a new eye by then, which was good, because he showed up wearing that ratty old patch.

“You’d go to pieces without me” was the first thing she said to him.

It became a familiar refrain. You’d go to pieces. In time, it proved to be true. A man can go his whole life never needing anyone. But when he finally finds the one, he can’t live without her.

Ellen had been living with Nate in the town nearest her sister’s jail. By then, Ellen had put it all out in the open to her nephew. Ellen was his aunt. She had been sent by Nate’s mother to check in on Nate at Little Heaven. Ellen had hired Micah and the other two.

Nate took it all pretty well. Kids didn’t suffer so much with cognitive dissonance. He missed his father, despite how badly Reggie had unraveled in his final days. It wasn’t his fault, Nate reasoned privately to himself. It was a lot to ask, and more than his father had been fit to bear. Nate wished his last memories of his father weren’t so negative. He wished he hadn’t seen his body on the grass in front of the chapel, his forehead… He wished he hadn’t seen that, but he knew, having seen it, that he always would.

He went back to school. His teachers remarked on what a pleasant, thoughtful boy Nate was—though they might have said in the privacy of the teacher’s lounge, over a quickly puffed cigarette, that he was more remote and somehow harder than a boy his age ought to be. As if Nate had suffered extreme pressures that had diamondized him. And those sparkling, diamond-like aspects of Nate were just a little off-putting. They made a person feel nervous, even when the boy gave you no good reason to feel that way in his presence.

Micah rented a room in the same town. Nobody there knew their histories.

At one point, a reporter came rolling in. Fussy guy with a Virginian accent, always wore a crisp vanilla-white suit. With one of the big-city dailies, he said. Had a hot tip that one or more of the survivors of the Little Heaven fire might be living right here. Well, that put a bug up the town’s collective ass. But Micah was glad that the reporter wasn’t much good at his job, and that he went away empty-handed to pursue some story about astronauts.

The three of them spent every waking minute together. Before long Ellen’s sister earned an early parole, time served for good behavior. Ellen helped her get reacquainted with life outside the walls. Then Nate moved back in with his mother. After that, it was time to go. Ellen had a new life to get on with. One that now included Micah.

For Micah’s part, he left it all behind. The gun-for-hire work. He had no other skills, but he was willing to learn. They got married in a small chapel in Santa Cruz. They bought a ranch and settled down. Micah wasn’t much of a herdsman or a farmer, but still, things had a way of working out. Money flowed to him, easy as water. Some said he had the devil’s own luck. If they only knew.

They were never far from the black rock. At first, they saw themselves as guardians of a sort. Sentinels. It was only a matter of hours to reach it, though neither of them had the smallest desire to make that journey. That place lived deep inside their minds, implacable as a pebble in their shoes. In time, though, they forgot about the rock—their conscious minds did, anyway. But it twisted away in their under-brains, as such things are wont to.

They had a child. Their greatest joy. Micah wept the day Petty was born. When she got sick as an infant, he sat up all night beside her crib, rocking her when she cried. And if, as she got older, Petty sensed a distance from her father, well, he was distant with everybody except her mother. He was not cold or unloving with Pet, and he was wildly protective of her—just, he seemed unable to open himself to her completely, as other fathers might. He carried an inarticulate sorrow that a man of few words was incapable of expressing.

Then one morning Micah’s wife, Petty’s mother, didn’t wake up.

Micah rose that morning to find her still sleeping. He got up to make breakfast. He found it strange that she would be asleep, as she was usually up before him. When he came back, she had not woken. He laughed under his breath—he was not a man for laughter, but Ellen could provoke it in him for almost no reason at all—and ate his breakfast alone. Petty woke and dressed and ate and went outside to play. Micah watched her run through the field, the crisp morning light falling through her spread fingers.

He went into the bedroom. Ellen was still sleeping. Her chest rose and fell; her eyeballs zipped around under her lids. There was something profound about her sleep. A seam of worry split Micah’s mind. He gripped her shoulder gently.

“Ellen?” He shook her. “Ellen?”

Her eyes opened then. Relief washed through Micah. But it soon faded. Ellen’s eyes were open, yes, but her chest rose and fell with the rhythm of sleep. Her body was warm and vibrating like a tuning fork that had been struck moments ago.

Their long waking nightmare began that day. Ellen’s eyes would remain open, often for days at a time—but she would not wake up. The doctor tried the standard techniques: loud noises, pinching the flesh between her thumb and forefinger. Nothing. A coma, or something like it. Locked-in syndrome: Micah heard the doctor speak this phrase over the phone. The doctor asked questions: Had they been out of the country recently? Had she been bitten by anything? Suffered a bad fall? Eaten some foreign delicacy for the first time? No, no, no, no, no.

Specialists came next. Sleep-disorder doctors and nerve-disorder doctors and doctors who administered to maladies Micah had never conceived. All useless. Ellen slept with her eyes wide open. She got thinner and thinner. The doctors plugged feeding tubes into her. She developed bedsores; they swelled and burst. Micah dressed them and turned her over often to prevent them from festering. As she rarely blinked, Ellen’s eyes would get as dry and tacky as peeled grapes. Micah had a specialist create moisturized eyeball shields made out of breathable fabric; he would put them over Ellen’s eyes and keep them wet with a special solution squeezed from an eyedropper.

Ellen’s sister and Nate moved to the nearest town. There wasn’t much they could do. They sat by Ellen’s bed and talked to her. They read books out loud; Nate would record himself reading books on cassettes, which Micah would play on the tape player in her room. The doctors said that might work; they said that Ellen might follow a familiar voice up out of the fog.

He slept beside her at night. Sometimes she turned to him, one of the moisture pads slipping off the convex of her eyes. Staring at him in the moonlight bleeding through the curtains—the light’s on, but nobody’s home. Or was somebody home? Was Ellen behind those eyes, trapped inside her own skull, screaming to be let out? She did not make a noise on those nights—except sometimes, in a whisper so hushed he could barely make it out, she would say: “Please, no. Please stop.” Those words iced his heart. What was happening inside her head? What horrors was she living through? He whispered to her: “Please wake up.” But he knew, in a complex chamber of his heart, that she would not—because of him. He had wished this upon her.

My dearest love will never leave me.

Had that been it? His wish? It must have been something like that, if not those words exactly—it hadn’t been anything expressible in words, anyway, and the creature hadn’t needed him to say it. It had simply reached into his heart and plucked it out.

You’d go to pieces… Never leave me.

And the creature had delivered, hadn’t it? Oh yes, in full. He wanted Ellen to be with him forever, never leaving his side. That had been his cowardly, heartsick wish. And so he’d gotten it. Lock, stock, and barrel.

“I am so sorry,” he whispered into her ear. “I never wanted this.”

And yet he had done it. His wish had put her there in that bed, beyond all remedy.

He thought about it. Going to the black rock. Asking that thing for Ellen’s release. But he had his daughter to consider, and he sensed it didn’t work that way. He had to wait. Suffer, as Ebenezer and Minerva were surely suffering. That was part of it. Perhaps the most crucial part. The suffering.

So they lived there—a man and his daughter and the woman they both loved—on the edge of some greater catastrophe that never quite arrived. But Micah understood that someday it would come to drag him back into the fray.

And then, one lonely night when the stars shone especially bright, the black thing’s henchman had come and taken his daughter.

Which is when it began all over again—because such things never truly ended, did they? The wheel went around and around. You rode along and it changed you. You didn’t change the wheel. It kept turning and turning until it was time to take that final spin.

3

FIRE IS THE GREAT PURIFIER.

The woods came back. The flames died down and the ashes nourished new life. It was not long before green shoots were pushing through a crackling layer of slag.

The shoots became trees and shrubs; the forest thrived as it had before. The woods climbed the hillsides and filled out the valleys in crisp chlorophyll green. Long alleys of undergrowth cast sprawling shadows so dense that it was chilly in their shade on even the warmest summer days. Wildflowers scattered knolls between sweeping boughs of oak and cottonwood; foxgloves and bracken shone redly in the broad sunshine. Deep thickets and spongy undergrowth sprang up; bramble and buckthorn and tangled knots of poison oak lay over the ground in heavy abundance, dank and choking.

The animals returned in time. The woods teemed with the smallest forms of life at first. The industry of ants, the scuttling of beetles. Then the chirp of birds and the scamper of rodents. Soon the animals that made a meal of those lower orders of life returned, too—the foxes and opossums and lynxes and wolves. Everything grew and spread and became whole again. The shadows stretched, and in them, life went on as it always had.

The black rock was there, too. It had been there forever.

No living creature approached its sheer cliffs. The animals and even the insects steered clear—something warned them off. Nothing grew upon the rock, or even near it. In the deepest hour of night, a sound could sometimes be heard emanating from it. A prolonged sigh. Was it of contentment, or of unspeakable pain? Impossible to tell.

The black rock stood within itself, brooding and implacable.

It waited as it always had. For that wheel to come round again.