Minerva rolled her own eyes. “I think Lewis wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. He’d hold it until your Rev gave him permission to spit.”
“Eli’s off limits,” Charlie said. “Nobody’s seeing him ’cept the doc and the Rev. His folks haven’t come back yet. Two full days they’ve been gone.”
“Your utopia is blowing up,” Ebenezer said.
Charlie stuffed his hands into his pockets. “The Lord sets trials for us all. And I’m not one to scurry from them. But I got a kid, right? My son, Ben. And to be honest, he’s not been himself lately.”
“What do you mean?” Ellen said, leaning forward on her cot.
“I don’t know, just off. Kind of, well… cruel. The other day my wife found him out back of our bunkhouse watching a big ole green grasshopper die in a jar of gasoline. When she asked what he was doing, Ben said that grasshoppers breathe through their sides—like, imagine if we had little mouths all down our ribs, sucking in air. He had a book of matches, too. My guess was that he was gonna wait until the bug was nearly drowned before fishing it out and lighting it up.”
Charlie shook his head. “That isn’t my boy. He’ll collect bugs, sure, and toads and snakes and what all. But he puts them in a shoe box with cotton batting so they’re good and comfy. He makes sure to poke holes in the lid. He likes the idea of owning them, I guess, and studying them, but he lets them go when he gets bored. Ben’s never purposefully killed them. And it’s one thing to thoughtlessly squash a bug to see the yellow of their guts squirt out—boys do that, and the Lord forgives them. It’s another thing to torture them, then light them on fire. That takes real consideration. Takes planning.”
Charlie shook his head again. “I gave Ben a proper hiding when I heard. Bent him over my knee and beat the white off his ass. Wasn’t right, Lord knows. I think I was more scared than him, because it’s like waking up to find something that isn’t quite your son sleeping in your son’s bed. Ben didn’t cry out or anything. He kept looking up as I spanked him like to say, That all you got, Pops?”
“A lot of people acting weird in Little Heaven,” Ellen said softly.
“It’s not always been so,” said Charlie. “The first bunch of months were great, just like the Rev said they would be. But lately, with the animals in the woods and the dogs going missing and the kids acting out of turn and now this with Eli…”
Micah said, “Do you think the Reverend will let you go?”
Charlie’s hands balled into fists. “We came willingly.”
Micah said, “Even still.”
“I worry about Cyril and Virgil,” Charlie admitted. “What they might do.”
Micah stared at Charlie. “Our other guns are back at the campsite.”
Charlie nodded. “I had your pistols, but Cyril, he took ’em.”
“You really think we’ll have to blast our way out of here?” said Ellen. “Have things gotten that nuts?”
Things can get nuts pretty fast, Micah thought. He knew it. He’d seen it.
Minerva said, “There’s something else in these woods.”
Everyone looked at her. A flush crept up her throat.
“Just something hostile,” she went on, undeterred. “I felt it the other night, searching for the boy. A million eyes scuttling over my skin. I don’t care if that sounds stupid. Maybe I’m going a little nuts myself.” She stared at them, her jaw fixed tight. “This fucking place.”
Nobody disputed her sense of things.
22
THEY DEPARTED MIDAFTERNOON. Micah, Minerva, Charlie, and Otis. As it turned out, it was an easy matter to slip away. The Reverend and his hired men were currently taken up with Eli. Not long before they left, Micah had spotted Cyril exiting the windowless bunkhouse where Eli was being kept. The man looked green around the gills.
Ellen agreed to stay back with Ebenezer. If anyone noticed they were missing, she would tell them the God’s honest truth—they had gone to recover their belongings from the campsite and would soon return for their injured friend.
“Be careful,” she told Micah. “We need you back here.”
Micah wondered: Was she worried they wouldn’t come back? Did she think they might get the guns and continue to the car, pedal to the metal, tear-assing eighty miles an hour away from Little Heaven?
They set off under an overcast sky. They walked through a forest drained of life. Not a peep, not a rustle. Charlie had his rifle and pistol. Otis had a compound bow and a quiver of hunting arrows.
“I don’t think you’ll find much to shoot at,” Minerva told him.
Otis nodded. “I haven’t spotted so much as a sparrow.”
They chatted to pass the time. Minerva asked Otis how he had come to know the Reverend.
“I’ve been with him going on fifteen years now,” he told her. “Long before Charlie came along. I was a pill head when Reverend Flesher found me. Staggering around the Tenderloin chock-full of drugs. I’m ashamed to tell you how I laid my hands on them, but that’s the way of that particular devil—you’ll do anything to please it.” He hung his head, humiliated at the memory of the man he’d been. “The Rev took me in. I was one of his first. I just looked at him and knew. The Lord speaks through this man. My folks raised me serious southern Baptist, but I fell away from the path. The Rev dragged me back on it. I helped stain and sand the floor in his new chapel, and I slept there at night. It gave me something to do with my hands. Helped keep the devil at bay. That, and the Reverend’s sermons. Then later, when he said he’s taking his flock into the unspoiled wilderness, away from all the wickedness and vice—I said, sign me up!”
“And it was good,” Charlie said. “Real good for a stretch here.”
“That’s a fact,” said Otis. “Little Heaven was just that. Heaven on earth. And now the clouds have rolled in. But the devil tests us, and he tests the Reverend most of all—because Satan knows if he can break the Rev’s resolve, he can snatch our souls. But the Reverend won’t let it happen.” Otis’s voice rose to the pitch of a true believer. “No, sir. He’s gonna walk Satan down and stomp a mudhole in his ass, pardon my French—”
“Ah, we’re all friends here,” said Minerva.
“The Reverend’s going to send Old Splitfoot back down to the pit,” Otis went on. “We just got to stay the course in our hearts and spirits. If we have to leave for a spell while the Reverend wages this battle, well… dark days, sure, but we’ve been through them before. Reverend Flesher has always guided us out.”
Charlie said, “Amen to that.”
They walked in silence until they came upon the pit. It was empty, the bottom filled with groundwater. They continued on, glimpsing few signs of the things that had pursued them nights ago. The odd snapped branch, ripped bark torn off trees, even a few pines torn out at the roots—but the damage seemed random, following no particular path.
Darkness was coming on by the time they reached the campsite. Their tents were undisturbed. Nothing had been torn apart or scattered. Micah crawled inside his tent and retrieved his second Tokarev pistol and several boxes of ammunition. He also found the long-bore Tarpley rifle. He felt reassured by its sturdiness. Heavy as a blunderbuss.
Minerva retrieved several boxes of ammunition for her own guns, currently in Cyril’s possession. She exited the tent with a small revolver.
“I found it in Ellen’s pack,” she said. “.38 police special.” She laughed. “Who would have figured Little Miss Bellhaven was packing heat? What a hellcat, uh?”
Maybe Ellen had brought it thinking she could take her nephew from Little Heaven by force. A desperate move, in Micah’s opinion. One that could have gotten her killed. He didn’t like to picture Ellen dead—and yet he did. Just for a flash.