“Hello, Reverend,” Eli had said. “Did you miss me?”
Amos had been dismayed to discover how much Eli’s voice mimicked the one that came to him every night.
For Amos, only one fact was certain: if the residents of Little Heaven saw Eli right then, everything he had been building would crumble. Fear would lead to disharmony, which would encourage desertion. The devil has come to Little Heaven, they would say. They would flee with the clothes on their backs, every last cowardly one of them, rats leaping from a flaming barge.
This is a test, he thought. The sternest one I have ever faced.
Swallowing his disgust, Amos had reached for the boy. Bugs crunched under his boots. Amos’s revulsion swelled when Eli reached for him, with a mangled hook of skin that had replaced one of his hands. Amos dodged it and grabbed Eli by the elbow; the boy’s flesh was clammy, that of a corpse in a vault. Amos pulled him up, his strength buoyed by a cresting wave of fear. His scalp was hot and itchy, melting the Dapper Dan pomade in his hair, which trickled down his face in gooey strings. Eli laughed at him. Amos might have been laughing, too, though he couldn’t properly remember—if so, it was the manic laugher of a man whose sanity was under threat.
“Cyril!” he had screamed. “CYRIL!”
Amos managed to drag Eli to the bunkhouse with no windows; the Reverend had had it built specially, thinking there might be a need for a place nobody could see inside. He flung the boy through the door and wiped his hand on his trousers. The boy staggered forward—his legs were wretched sticks—and collapsed. The roaches clinging to his legs let go and scuttled through cracks in the floor. The boy was still laughing.
“Shut up,” Amos hissed. “Shut your rotten mouth.”
Cyril came in. His mouth fell open and a thin moan came out.
“Hello, Cyril,” the boy said, waving his hook.
“Get the doctor,” Amos said. “And not a word of the boy’s state to anyone. If anyone asks you, say that he is back and he is perfectly fine.”
Brother Lewis soon arrived with his black bag. The boy was in the cot by then, covered in a sheet. Lewis took one look at Eli and blanched.
“Is this Eli?” he whispered, stunned. “Little Eli with the red hair…?”
Eli stared at Lewis with those calculating gray eyes. He licked his lips. His tongue was brown and pebbled with waxy lesions.
“Do something,” Amos said. “Fix him.”
“This child is broken,” Lewis said remotely. “Unfixable.”
“Fix me, fix me, then you have to kiss me,” the boy warbled.
The sheet slipped down Eli’s chest. The men saw a bulge under the boy’s armpit. A swollen ball like a fleshy balloon set to burst.
It… pulsed. The entirety of it. Throbbing like a misplaced heart.
Amos watched it, revolted—but also entranced.
“Cut it,” he said mildly.
“I’m sorry?” said Lewis.
“Cut it open. See what’s inside.”
Lewis gave the Reverend a look of open horror. “I couldn’t possibly—”
“You will,” Amos said deathly soft. “If a poison is festering in this child, we must release it.”
Lewis unzipped his bag and produced a scalpel. The man did not question the Reverend any further. Flesher was adept at spotting the most spineless specimens of humanity, and Lewis had always been one of the most obedient lambs in his flock.
Lewis held the tip to the boy’s flesh. The swollen ball shuddered. Eli’s skin opened up under the blade as if it had been begging to do just that. The blood, what there was of it, was black and clotted. The boy tittered. A terrible reek bloomed up. Things squirmed in the spongy red meat inside the scalpel-slit—the red of a blood orange.
“Never seen anything the likes of…” Lewis trailed off.
The slit widened under the pressure of whatever pushed back from inside the bloated ball; the cut opened up like a smile until—
Maggots. A wriggling fall of them. They pushed through the boy’s sundered flesh, writhing animatedly, their fat ribbed bodies making greasy sounds. Amos struggled to conceive of the flies these enormous flabby things would turn into when they assumed their final, revolting shape—a crude image formed: flies as big as cockroaches, inconceivable bloatflies laying their bean-shaped eggs in old cratered meat. The maggots pattered to the ground, where they began to squirm and shudder toward the darkened corners of the room.
Amos stood stunned, trapped in a bubble of disgust. That bubble popped—a wet thop! inside his head—and he set about stomping the foul things to paste under his boots. He relished the soft give of their bodies as they burst moistly, like skinned grapes.
“Hah!” Amos screamed. “Hah! Hah! Hah!”
Something else crawled out of the boy’s wound. A fly. A massive one. It picked its way out of Eli’s ruined flesh and fanned its wings. It took flight, zinging straight at Amos. It hit his chin—it almost flew into his mouth, oh God!—and bounced away, producing a whine like a bullet.
More followed. The room was suddenly teeming with flies. Their buzz was monolithic. The boy’s laughter climbed through several octaves to marry itself to that buzz. The sound drilled into Amos’s ears and beat against his brain.
Dr. Lewis bolted for the door and was out before Amos could lay hands on him.
Amos rushed outside in pursuit. “Stay here,” he told Cyril, who stood watch at the door. “Don’t let anyone in.”
Amos chased Lewis across the square. Nobody had seen a thing except for the outsiders, who would stay out of this if they knew what was good for them. He caught up with the doctor behind the storehouse, where he had collapsed in a sobbing heap.
“No no no no no…,” he said, hiccuping each no between sobs.
Amos knelt and ran his hand through Lewis’s sweaty hair.
“Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh,” he said. “You will wake the children. We can’t have that.”
Lewis stared up at him. His face was pink as a boiled ham. “We have to leave, Reverend. That boy… this place is cancerous. It’s making us all sick.”
“Nonsense. You have had a shock.”
“The devil is here,” Lewis said. “I can feel him. The devil took that poor boy and sent him back to us as something vile.”
Amos’s hand clenched in Lewis’s hair. Gently but firmly, he cranked Lewis’s head upward until the simpering imbecile was forced to gaze directly into the Reverend’s eyes.
“The devil was with you in that movie theater in the Tenderloin all those years ago, wasn’t he?” Amos said softly. “There in the dark, wasn’t he? Watching you. And he must have slipped inside of you for a spell, too. Isn’t that right, Brother Lewis? How else could you explain what you did with that boy in that dark theater with the sticky floors? And he was a boy, wasn’t he? No more than sixteen, wasn’t that what you said? A runaway, no doubt. Blond and fair with ruby lips.”
Lewis began to shake. His eyes welled with fresh tears.
“It was the devil who made you ache for that boy. It was the devil who brought you there. It was the devil who unzipped your pants and guided that boy’s mouth onto your—”
“Stop,” Lewis sobbed. “Please, Reverend, please stop.”
“It was the devil who did that, but it was the Lord who brought you to my doorstep. And haven’t I always done right by you? Haven’t I always kept your confessions and occasional indiscretions a matter between myself and the Lord?”