“It’s mine,” Minerva said. “Lots of animals out here.”
“There are,” the Reverend agreed. “Most hunters use rifles.”
Minerva lip-farted. “Wasn’t hunting. Just wanted to scare them if I had to.”
“Where are your tents?” Flesher said, flinching slightly at Minerva’s raspberry. “Your sleeping bags?”
“We had to abandon them last night,” Ellen said, speaking for the first time. “There was something in the woods. Some animal—animals. They chased us.”
The Reverend sighted her down his nose. “You sound like Otis. To hear him speak, the woods are full of man-eating bears and pixies and leprechauns, no doubt. Any animals in these woods are more petrified of us than we could ever be of them. That is how the Lord decreed it. My dear child, don’t you know that we are the highest order of life?”
My dear child. Did he just call Ellen that? Minerva tried to swallow her anger, but it lodged in her throat like a peach stone.
“Then why dig the damn pit in the first place?” she said hotly.
The Reverend’s gaze pinned her. She felt his eyes on her body, even if they were covered by those aviator shades—his eyes boring into her not in a sexual manner, but invasive in a different way: the feeling of sightless bugs crawling over her skin.
“Well.” He spread his hands again, signaling their conversation had come to an end. “I must prepare for the afternoon sermon. The Lord has brought you to our bower and it is our duty to shelter you. Charlie, Otis, they may stay in Greta Hughes’s old quarters. Have Dr. Lewis attend to this fellow’s ankle.”
He cocked his head at his visitors. Their faces were warped in the silver convex of his sunglasses.
“I would invite you to the sermon, but that is only for the elect here at Little Heaven. You will amuse yourselves, though, I’m sure.”
He hadn’t even bothered to ask their names. It was all this fellow and my dear child.
He really is a dickhole, Minerva thought, happy to have her first impressions confirmed.
Otis and Charlie led them to a cramped bunkhouse with two cots. They said they would send for Dr. Lewis. Their guns were not returned to them.
15
ONCE THEY WERE SETTLED, Ellen Bellhaven decided to take a tour of the compound.
“I’m going for a walk,” she announced.
“We’ve been walking for twenty-four hours,” said Minerva.
Ellen expected Micah to object. But he simply nodded. “I’ll stay close by,” Ellen promised.
The sky was scudded with clouds. A cool wind skated across the earth. The parade square remained empty. Apart from the Reverend and the woman who had opened the gate, Ellen hadn’t seen anybody since she’d gotten there.
She crossed the square. The tinkle of a piano drifted across from the chapel. The pianist must have been warming up for the service.
She didn’t want to hear the damn sermon anyway—Amos Flesher struck her as many men of the cloth had done over the years: a bully who had learned to fight with scripture rather than his fists. A wise choice on his part, as he didn’t look like he could punch his way out of a wet grocery bag. Still, her exclusion reminded her of the Catholic services she had attended with her childhood friend Susie Horton; she had to sit in the pews with the other heretics while everyone else enjoyed their tasteless wafers and watery wine.
The perimeter fence followed the northern edge of the forest. The light between the first cut of trees was thin, almost drowsy, like a summer twilight that falls through a girl’s bedroom window as she slips off to sleep. But beyond that point it grew gradually darker until nothing could be seen at all.
Ellen walked the fence line, trailing her fingers along the links. She noticed that the trees were green and healthy except for a stretch, maybe ten yards wide, where they were uniformly sick and dying. Their bark was the gray of dead fingernails, flaking away from the yellowed wood underneath. No needles clung to their branches. The ground beneath was ashen. Ellen could see no cause for it—unless someone had soaked the soil with gallons of tree killer, and who in their right mind would do such a thing?
She peered through the maze of dead limbs, leaning forward until her nose nearly touched the fence… She recoiled.
The light moved differently the deeper into the woods she looked. It shifted and churned and took on a life of its own. Ellen got the unpleasant sense that it was staring right back at her. Which was utter foolishness. It was the middle of the afternoon, and neither light nor shadow had its own animus.
Her eyes lifted over the wasted trees to the rock formation looming to the west. It was massive and boxy, less a mountain than some kind of obelisk—a boxy tusk—pushed up from the earth. It rested against the horizon in solitary abandonment.
She continued past a string of bunkhouses where the Little Heavenites must spend their nights. The windows were transparent sheet plastic stapled to the frames—it would be hard to transport glass up here, Ellen guessed. But all the windows on the Reverend’s dwelling were made of glass, weren’t they? What had these people left to come here? Surely homes more impressive than these. But that was part of faith, wasn’t it? Suffering. Ellen had never cottoned to that thinking. Life was too damn tough on its own terms to go depriving yourself further.
She hoped she’d see her nephew, Nate, gazing through one of the plastic windows or chasing a ball across the square. Even seeing mailman Reggie would be fine, as it would mean Nate was nearby. They couldn’t have left, could they? Well, better if so. Better Reggie was back delivering letters and Nate back in school.
The living quarters gave way to a warehouse strung with wooden doors. All were closed except one. She peered through it into an area containing an array of familiar equipment: an open-faced furnace, metal blowpipes, and buckets of decorative glass beads. A glassblowing setup. Ellen had taken a course on it years ago—she was going through a bohemian phase while dating a modern primitive who played the pan flute in the Tenderloin district. Folly of youth.
She passed around the edge of the warehouse and found herself facing the playground.
A gaggle of children was immersed in some distraction beside the teeter-totter. Curious, Ellen wandered over. It was good to finally see some life at Little Heaven.
Three girls, one boy. The boy was not Nate—he was too old, and a redhead. Nate had brown hair, or was it black? Their laughter frothed over Ellen. They were hunched in a circle, working intently at something.
She drew closer. They all wore the same shoes—Buster Browns. The soles were cracked and scuffed. Maybe they were brother and sisters, or maybe all the children at Little Heaven had to wear the same clothes the way the Amish do? She could hear their animated whispers.
“Stir them around,” one girl said. “That will make them bite.”
The boy did something with a stick. A stirring motion followed by a series of quick jabs.
“Yes, oh yes,” a girl with plaited blond hair said, “that’s working. Do it some more.”
Ellen was five feet away. None of them had noticed her. A powerful dread built inside of her. Why was she so worried? It was just some kids playing.
“Hello,” she said.
They turned, all at once. Ellen’s breath hitched. She took a step back.
There’s something the matter with these kids.
That was her first, purely instinctive thought. They weren’t sick in an obvious way. No boils on their arms or open sores on their faces. They were not palsied, their mouths hanging open and leaking drool. And yet there was something—absolutely, fundamentally—wrong with them.