“I was going to pick posies for you,” he said. “On account of you being so peachy keen.”
“Oh yeah?” She spat in the dirt. “Drop dead in a shed, Fred.”
“Dive off a cliff, Biff,” he shot right back.
Little Heaven was silent. The only light came from the security lamps strung round the perimeter. The fog hung thickly between the first cut of pines. It swirled in odd patterns, as if at the beck of forces Ebenezer was not attuned to.
They heard it then. Ringing, singsong. The laughter of a child.
They moved toward it, Minerva walking and Eb limping. Ebenezer didn’t want to take another step—the laughter had developed a throaty undertone he didn’t much care for—but his feet would not obey him. He kept gimping on, vaguely horrified at his inability to stop. Minerva’s flashlight shone on the ground in front of them. Nobody else was awake. The compound was at rest. It was just them, alone.
The sound was coming from behind the chapel. The shadows were heaviest there, as the chapel lay at the edge of the compound facing the trees. The flashlight illuminated its rough boards, the paint beginning to flake. The laughter hummed against Ebenezer’s ears like the beat of tiny wings.
“Hello?” Minerva said.
The laughter stopped. In its place was a dry crackly noise that made Ebenezer picture wet seashells, thousands of them, tumbling over one another.
They rounded the side of the chapel that faced the woods. A shape hunched under the silhouette of the crucifix. The fog was hugged tight to it.
“Who’s there?” Ebenezer said.
The flashlight beam jittered toward the shape; Eb got the sense Minerva was reluctant to illuminate this thing, whatever it was. The light crept over the chapel wall and down, falling on the head of the figure sitting there. The fog peeled back, divulging more and more of its body—
A boy. He sat facing away from them. The mist still clung to his lower half. He was doing something with his hands. The dry, chittery sound was quite powerful now. Ebenezer had no clue what was making it, but the noise itself was enough to sour the spit in his mouth.
They approached the boy, who seemed to have taken no note of them. Fifteen feet, ten feet… the boy turned. He was naked from the waist up. His ribs protruded. His clavicles jutted like beaks. His flesh was white as soap. His eyes were gray. The color of a slug.
Minerva stumbled back and bumped into Ebenezer. He felt the beat of her heart through her clothes—it was hammering hard enough to rattle her entire frame.
The boy smiled. He was bucktoothed—teeth like elephant toes. His slug eyes seemed to pin them both, though lacking pupils it was hard to tell for sure.
The shucking, chittery sounds intensified…
The boy held a dead bird in his hands. The bird’s eyes were the same as the boy’s. He stroked it tenderly. His demeanor was quiet and content, as if he had been found playing with his Matchbox cars in his bedroom.
There was something the matter with one of his hands. The skin seemed to have melted or calcified or fused, the fingers welded into a solid scoop of flesh. He stroked the bird with it, lovingly so. Later, Ebenezer wouldn’t be sure he had seen any of this—there was a vacancy in his memory, a dark sucking hole where something dirty had been buried.
The mist rolled away from the boy’s lower half, the white wisps trailing off to reveal a bristling carpet of perpetual industry.
Bugs. Bark beetles and cockroaches and God knew what else. Millions of bugs covered the boy to his waist. They surged around his hips, antennae waving, crawling over and around one another the way insects do—a way that humans never could, because that mindless proximity of bodies would drive any person mad. They flooded around the boy’s legs, fanning out in a ten-foot circle. Most of their bodies were the brown of a blood blister, but some were a larval albino white. They massed in a pattern that seemed random, but if you looked closely, their movements appeared to have some spirit of organization.
Minerva turned to Ebenezer, her eyes bulging in horror. Ebenezer was barely able to stifle a scream himself—when was the last time he’d screamed in abject fright? As a child, surely, at the prospect of the boogeyman lurking under his bed.
The boy beheld them with those horrid, soul-shriveling eyes and said, “I am so happy to be back home.”
21
THE NEXT MORNING, Brother Charlie Fairweather showed up at their bunkhouse.
“Mind if I come in?”
Micah was still trying to piece together the events of the past night. He’d heard Eb get up, and Minny after him. He hadn’t made much of it when they both stepped outside—Minny wouldn’t make her move now, he knew, so the most she’d do was jaw at him a little.
Minutes later, there was a big commotion. Had Micah misjudged it—had she tried to flatline Ebenezer? It would have to count as strange timing, but Minerva was an odd woman. But then he’d heard the Reverend yelling: “Cyril! CYRIL!”
Turns out that the boy, Eli, had been found behind the chapel. It was Eb and Minny who found him. But by the time Micah made it to the square, the Reverend had already hustled the boy off to a private bunkhouse. Nobody had seen him since.
Afterward, Ebenezer and Minerva sat on the same cot. Minerva’s face was white as clotted cream, Eb’s a bloodless gray. They said they had come upon the boy covered in bugs. The boy had pupil-less eyes. Something fucked to do with his hand, too.
Following this revelation, serious consideration was given to just up and leaving. What if they were to kidnap Nate? Knock him out—did that Doc Lewis have any ether? If Reggie raised a stink, Micah was willing to knock him out, too, either with ether or his fists. But the plan was imperfect. Eb was still hobbled, for one. And chances were they’d be spotted. While Neeps, Swicker, and the Reverend would be happy to see the ass end of them, they weren’t likely to permit Micah to cart one of their lambs away over his shoulder like a sack of oats. Neeps and his partner had guns, too, and things had soured to the point where Micah was pretty sure they would use them. After that, it would be him, Eb, and Minny flung into shallow graves with quicklime eating their eyes. Maybe Ellen, too. Still, snatching the boy could be their best shot. Do it quiet, cause a distraction, leave in the pandemonium. Let Little Heaven go to hell in a handbasket and read all about it in the papers a few months later.
They were discussing this when Charlie knocked. Micah opened the door and ushered him inside. Charlie cleared his throat and said, “A few of us been talking. Me and Otis, Nell and Jack Conkwright. Plus my own wife. We think… well, we might like to take a break from Little Heaven.”
He spoke as though the words gave him physical pain. He peeked out the window to make sure nobody was poking around outside. “We figured you could help us,” he said.
“We’re hikers,” said Micah.
“You aren’t no hikers. And why wouldn’t you want to leave?” said Charlie. “Why not we all go? Safety in numbers.”
“We cannot all go.” Micah nodded at Ebenezer, laid up on his bunk. “Not with him in his shape.” He eyed Charlie cagily. “Why now, Charlie? What is prodding you?”
Charlie shifted foot to foot like a man with a bladderful of piss. “Was there something wrong with Eli’s eyes?” he asked Minerva. “Dr. Lewis says it isn’t anything. A milky glaze… an occlusion, he called it. Just a coating, like pulp or something. He wiped it away and Eli’s eyes were just fine underneath.”