Flies escaped from the hole in Eli’s armpit. They massed in the high corners of the bunkhouse. A thick, pendulous blanket of flies—a thousand starving spiders wouldn’t be able to eat them all. The air teemed with the maddening purr of their wings.
Eli sat up. His chest quivered with industry—the Reverend couldn’t help but think that his entire body was full of flies, his insides cored out and replaced by a dark colony of insects.
Eli began to issue full-throated, booming laughs that shook his entire body.
The Reverend finally found his feet. He began to back toward the door on benumbed feet.
“Come back,” Eli pleaded, mock-coy. “I have so much to share with you.”
The Reverend reached for the doorknob. He opened the door, staggered outside, and slammed it. Cyril was eying him warily.
“I heard something,” Cyril said.
“It was nothing,” the Reverend said. “Lock the door. Nobody goes in there.” He swallowed with difficulty. “Not one goddamn person.”
Cyril padlocked the door. Then he moved his chair a few feet away from it.
“Just so you’re not totally in the dark, two of your flock lit out with the one-eyed prick and the scarecrow chick,” Cyril said. “They left sometime yesterday.”
“Who? Which two?”
“Charlie Fairweather and Otis Whats-his-face. The nigger and the other woman are still here. So’s Charlie’s wife and kid.”
“Then they’ll be coming back,” Amos said, regaining a measure of composure.
He staggered back to his dwelling. The boy’s mocking laughter continued to echo in his ears. He was on the verge of hysteria. The dread boiled up from the soles of his feet, spanning through his veins and nerve endings like a poisonous flower coming into bloom.
He collapsed on his bed, burrowed his face into his lilac-scented pillow, and screamed. In the darkness behind his shut eyelids, he kept seeing the boy opening his eyes, the cancerous black of them peering into his lacerated, penitent inner self.
Did you enjoy that, Reverend?
He screamed so hard that his vocal cords frayed. He was only mildly aware when the timbre of it changed—when it came to sound a little bit like unhinged, slightly deranged laughter.
26
THE THINGS IN THE WOODS did not follow them. Or if they did, then at a distance too great for Micah to sense.
They had set off from the meadow at a hurried clip as soon as it became clear that retreat was their sole option. They had taken only what they could easily carry. Dawn washed over the woods, creating trembling pockets of light between the trees. Nothing moved. The forest was drained of natural life—or that life had been repurposed into something infinitely more grotesque.
Micah could not shake the sight of the thing from the previous night. Alive it had been fearsome. Dead, more pitiful. Its slack, flame-eaten pelt, thick as a radial tire. Its many heads and eyes and limbs. Most of all, Micah could not forget the sense of agony that radiated off of it. A thing that would like nothing more than to die, yet was kept alive by infernal mechanics Micah couldn’t possibly understand.
Initially they had run from the meadow, their metal cups and utensils rattling from the riggings of their packs. They had sprinted until their breath came in heaves. But when it became clear that they were not being pursued, their pace had slackened.
“So what the hell was that?” Minerva said.
Nobody could answer. It was nothing that should exist in this world.
“Whatever they are, they are purposeful,” Micah said. “They would prefer we not leave.”
Otis said, “What, do you think they’re…?”
“Funneling us back to Little Heaven?” said Minerva. “I think that’s exactly what Shug means. Isn’t it?”
Micah offered the faintest of nods. He wasn’t sure the creatures themselves were knowingly directing them back the way they had come—perhaps whatever had minted them was doing that.
“Satan,” Charlie said. “Instruments of the devil.”
“Be sober, be vigilant,” Otis quoted tremblingly, “because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”
Hours later they walked into the midmorning sun. They were tired and dirty and fearful. Even Micah was scared—Micah Shughrue, a man who some said was so cool that he drank boiling water and pissed ice cubes. He was afraid of no man. He had glimpsed the blackness of the human heart. Yet somehow they had now passed from that known realm of evil—one he could sense in the Reverend especially, and to a lesser degree in the Reverend’s hired men—to a new and uncharted one, populated by forces Micah had never encountered. It unlocked a thirsty horror within him. One so dark he couldn’t see any light in it.
They came to a dip where the path bellied out to a cut between the trees. The land fell away in layers of shale and red dirt into a narrow valley. Micah stared through that cut and saw something he had not seen either time he had passed this spot before.
A squat shape was visible several hillsides over. A structure of some sort. It looked much bigger than a hunting shack.
Micah said, “What is that?”
“I never keyed on it until just now,” Otis admitted.
“You figure somebody’s living out there?” said Minerva.
Micah clocked the distance, judging it at six or seven miles. He could make out a narrow path winding across the valley floor.
“You’re not thinking…,” Otis started.
“We should take a look,” Micah said.
“That’s a good hike,” said Otis. “The daylight will be gone by the time we get there.”
“Do you want to spend another night in the woods?” Charlie asked Micah.
“There is evil at Little Heaven, too,” Micah reasoned.
“My wife and kid are there,” said Charlie.
Micah nodded. “I will go. You need not.”
“You do that,” said Otis, his face reddening. “You go right ahead and fill your boots to the brim with that. See how it works out for you.”
Charlie and Otis took a few steps down the path leading back to the compound. They looked miserable but resigned.
“I wish you would reconsider,” said Otis, abruptly penitent.
Minerva hung between them. “Ah jeez, Shug. Really?”
Micah said nothing.
“Ah, fuck it. What’s that old expression?”
Micah said, “You only live once.”
Minerva shook her head. “That’s not the one I was thinking of. It’s more along the lines of A stubborn bastard and his head are soon parted, unless I go with him.”
Micah said, “I am unfamiliar with that one.”
“Yeah, well, something like that. Let’s go, you pigheaded sonofabitch.”
Otis and Charlie watched them skid down the incline to the base of the valley, their heels kicking up puffs of red dust.
“We will return tomorrow,” Micah called up.
“Go with God!” Charlie called back.
“I’ll go with the crisp, refreshing taste of Shasta instead!” Minerva shouted. “It hasta be Shasta!”
Minerva gave Charlie a cheery wave, but she didn’t feel that way. She felt lost and freaked out. She wished she could see this situation the way Micah surely did. He wasn’t inclined to consider how things came to be. His mind was tuned toward dealing with things the way they were. To him, the creatures in the woods existed, somehow, and had to be reckoned with. Which was the best way of seeing it right now, trapped in the heart of it. Minerva knew Micah was scared—the man was tough, but he wasn’t insane—but his fear inspired a direct levelheadedness. Those awful things were an equation to be solved. Micah didn’t need to explain or understand them. He only had to act. She wished she had that particular nerve, or bone, or part of her brain that allowed her to do the same.