“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Who are you?” asked one of the girls. She wore a yellow dress that had faded to the color of old parchment. Her voice made it sound less of a question than an accusation. “You scared us.”
Their faces were caved in the same way Charlie’s and Otis’s had been, but worse—or perhaps it only seemed worse because they were young? Their flesh appeared to be slumping into their skulls, the way the earth sags before a sinkhole opens up in it. There were fine wrinkles around their mouths and eyes and even the knobs of their ears. They looked as if they had stepped from a terrible compression chamber that had added years to them.
Ellen stared past them to their industry—she couldn’t look at their too-old faces for another second. She saw a small ring of sticks jabbed into the dirt, with twine banded round to keep them in place.
Things were moving inside the ring of sticks. Quite a lot of things—
Something was thrashing around in there, too. Thrashing and squealing.
“I’m…” Ellen said slowly. “We were lost in the woods. Some of your people found us and brought us here.”
The boy smiled at her. It was not a pretty smile. His skin seemed too hard and white, more bone than flesh. “Little Heaven welcomes you,” he said.
Ellen stepped closer. The children moved aside so she could see. They exhibited no shame—in fact, they seemed eager to show her.
A hairless shrew was staked inside the ring. A loop of wire was knotted around its tail, the trailing end wound round a stick sunk into the dirt in the center of the ring. The shrew was covered in red ants. They surged over its body in a thick carpet, four deep in spots. The shrew shrieked as the ants mercilessly stung it.
“There are no animals left,” the boy said. “But if we’re good, he gives us one.”
He who? Ellen wondered.
“Why are you doing this?”
One of the girls said: “For everything there is a season.”
The bone-faced boy waved the stick he’d used to stir the ants like a conductor urging his orchestra toward a crescendo. He hummed a tuneless ditty. “Hmmm-hm-hmm-mmmm, ha-hum-hmmmm…”
The girls giggled. The boy’s fingertips were bloody from shrew bites and swollen from ant stings. He seemed to neither notice nor care.
Ellen said, “Where are your parents?”
“You talk too much,” said the girl in the faded dress. They all giggled some more.
The shrew’s struggles were slackening. Its black eyes stared out from the massing ants, dull and expressionless. A terrible soft hiss rose up, the sound of the ants’ bustling bodies. Ellen wanted to kick the ring apart. But she was worried about what these children might do to her if she stopped their barbarous game.
She knelt and pushed the children aside. She did so roughly, mildly revolted by the soapy feel of their skin. They parted willingly, brushing past her, leaving the playground. Ellen thought they had merely grown bored, or were going to tattle on her for pushing them, but they were moving toward the chapel, whose bell had now begun to toll.
The girl with plaited golden hair spun nimbly on her heel.
“You’re going to love it here,” she said. “You won’t ever want to leave.”
Ellen pulled the ring of sticks apart. She saw it had been built around the ants’ hill—they were only defending their home.
The shrew wasn’t moving anymore.
16
“A SHREW?”
Minerva forked chunky, tasteless stew into her mouth. They were sitting in the mess: Minerva, Ellen, Micah. Ebenezer was back in the bunkhouse, waiting for the doctor to look at his ankle.
Ellen had found them here shortly after her encounter with the children. She could only manage a bite of stew. Her appetite was gone. She had buried the poor shrew in a patch of dirt along the fence. Its body was swollen to double its size from the ant venom, so much that its skin had split open.
“They pinned it on top of an anthill,” she said. “They tortured it.”
Minerva picked mystery meat from her teeth. “Little shits. Well. Who am I to criticize? I had a magnifying glass as a kid. You think I used it to look at stamps? I must’ve fried a small city’s worth of ants.”
Ellen nodded. She, too, understood how kids could be. But it was one thing to allow nature to take its course—to watch a spider consume a fly in its web, say—versus actively pushing a horrible outcome. There was something sadistic about it. Not to mention there had been four of them. One child engaging in solitary sadism, okay. You put that kid on a watch list. But to see four of those children celebrating an animal’s suffering…
The mess was empty apart from the cook who had served them the stew. When they had asked the cook where they should sit, he just flapped his hand toward the back of the mess.
“They didn’t look well,” Ellen said. “The kids. They looked… malnourished. I’ve never seen anyone with scurvy—could that be it?”
“They could be underfed,” said Minerva. “Who knows what they eat out here, or how often. Could be some lean days.”
“Yeah, but isn’t that abusive?”
Minerva shrugged. “Not if they signed up for it. Not if they stay.”
“This place,” Ellen said. “I don’t like it. I don’t like him. The Reverend.”
“We will soon depart,” said Micah.
They might—the hired guns. Ellen realized they had been tasked with getting her here, nothing more. They had lost their guns the other night, and it was not shocking that they would want to leave, seeing as the denizens of Little Heaven were quite unwelcoming. But could she go? After seeing those kids and catching a sense of the sickness that appeared to infect this place—and after encountering those things in the woods last night, the creatures that had chased them relentlessly—could she leave without her nephew? What could she tell her sister? Sorry, Sherri, the place creeped me out. I had to hightail it. Even if Nate seemed okay now, who was to say he wouldn’t soon be infected by whatever was spreading around here?
But was anything happening? Or was she just spooked by Little Heaven’s weird vibe and its pompadoured head honcho? It wasn’t like they were sacrificing virgins or dancing naked in the light of the moon.
Not that you know, anyway, said a wary voice in her head.
“I don’t like not having our guns,” Minerva said.
Micah nodded his agreement. “Our weapons are a ways off,” he said. “We do not want to return to the campsite. Not yet.” He lowered his voice. “We will keep an eye out. Perhaps there is a way to get our hands on something.”
The chapel bell tolled as the service ended. People began to file into the mess. They had a glaze-eyed expression that made them look like sleepers roused from a pleasant dream. They filed in silently, shoes whispering on the floorboards. Most of them wore field clothes, overalls and dungarees, even the women. They took notice of the new arrivals, but nobody stopped to say hello. There were about forty in all. Ellen counted fifteen children, including the four who had tormented the shrew. The oldest could have been thirteen, the youngest a toddler.
Reggie and Nate came in last. Ellen’s heart lifted, then sank.
She had not seen her nephew in years. But she recalled a ruddy-cheeked and, well, robust little fella. A stout bowling pin of a boy who had careened recklessly around her sister’s front room, shrieking merrily as Sherri chased him and tickled him under the armpits. The Nate she spied now was pallid and drained, as if there were leeches at work under his clothes. He had the look of a future telethon case: a boy propped up in a bed with tubes poking out of his arms while dewy-eyed viewers called in their pledges.