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…
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY THANKS TO THE USUAL SUSPECTS: my rockin’ agent, Kirby Kim; my kickass editor, Ed Schlesinger; Jennifer Bergstrom and Stephanie DeLuca and everyone at Gallery Books. To my father, who read and offered his thoughts on the first draft; my mother, who’s always pulling for me; my wonderful wife, Colleen, who supports me through this strange and meandering journey; and our son, Nicholas, who just does what he does and makes us smile every day. To artist extraordinaire Adam Gorham, who provided the awesome illustrations throughout this book—grazie mille! To the fine writers who were willing to read the manuscript and offer their kind words, I’m deeply appreciative for your generosity.
Now, if you’re one of those readers who skip to the end of the book and check out the acknowledgments before finishing, I ought to post a warning here.
SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!
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REALLY, I’M DEAD SERIOUS. SPOILERS AHEAD.
OKAY?
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
So. Amos Flesher. Anyone with a passing knowledge of religious fanaticism and cults will see where I drew inspiration for that character’s portrayal—the aviator shades, the fussy hairdo, hell, even the method by which Amos dispatched his unruly worshipers. In fact, it’s even more depraved than you might suspect: for Flesher’s final speech, delivered to his flock minutes before their demise, I liberated the odd snatch of dialogue from the transcripts of Jim Jones’s own speech to the disciples of his People’s Temple—the one where he compels his followers to drink the Kool-Aid. You can find it online, if you’ve got a mind to read it. When Flesher says, “I’ll never detach myself from any of your troubles. I’ve always taken your troubles right on my shoulders” and “Say, say peace”—those were lines spouted by Jones his own self as he prodded his people to drink up. The rest of it, okay, I pulled that out of thin air. But a few of those lines belong to ole Jimmy, the crazy rat bastard. So, uhhhh, I guess credit where credit’s due?
Thank you most of all, dear reader. Obviously no writer would be able to do what they do without an audience out there to receive his or her words, so I’m especially grateful for the support of those who take the time to read the Cutter books. Merci!
ABOUT NICK CUTTER
NICK CUTTER is the national bestselling author of The Troop (winner of the James Herbert Award for Horror Writing), The Deep, and The Acolyte (with ChiZine Publications), and is a pseudonym for an acclaimed author of novels and short stories. He lives in Canada.