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 oiclass="underline" 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.