Little Heaven

1

PETTY SHUGHRUE did not know what this creature might be, but she was positive it was not a man.

It looked human. Two arms. Two legs. A head.

But that was the problem—it only looked that way. For one, it was far taller than any man on earth; the dairyman, Mr. Bickner, was the tallest man Petty had ever seen, and this thing was at least two feet taller than him. Its arms were long and its joints were set in weird places, making its arms bend in odd ways. Its legs were also too long and did not hinge at the knees so much as pivot in all directions, a bit like a spider’s legs. It wore dark pants and a duster of black lizard skin. The coat rippled out from its body, stinking like the dead gopher she’d found under the porch two springs ago.

Its face… Petty didn’t ever want to look at its face again. Its head was big and bulgy and hairless. It had no nose, only a pair of moist holes. Its mouth was so wide it nearly split its head apart—and its lips were plump, fleshy, somehow succulent, which was a word Petty had recently learned in grammar class. The summer strawberry was succulent. You almost wanted to kiss those lips—not really, in fact you’d rather kiss anything else, a bowl of razor blades or a starving piranha or any other thing at all… What Petty felt was an ungodly compulsion, a revolting desire to kiss those lips. Even though she knew they would taste like death.

Even worse than its mouth were its eyes. Two chunks of coal screwed into its head. The moonlight reflected off them in terrible ways, showing their broiling inner cores—Petty swore she could see things squirming behind its eyes like leeches in a jam jar.

It moved at a swift clip without effort. Its legs hurdled logs and snarled deadfalls in great, unhurried strides. She was carried along with it, her hand swallowed in its own. Her feet were still bare and she wore nothing but her nightdress, but she wasn’t cold or sore, even though they had covered many miles. Her feet rarely touched the earth—she seemed to ghost along it on a ribbon of air.

The Long Walker. That was what she would call this thing. It was her habit to name everything: her dolls, Jenny and Josephine; her wooden trains, Honey and Tugger and Pip; even the little brown mouse that lived in a hole in the kitchen, Mr. Squeaks.

She had been with the Long Walker for… Petty could not say how long. Her mind was foggy like it was after the doctor took out her tonsils. Time didn’t seem important. She could tell some hours had passed, maybe even a day. She was thirsty.

Soon, my dear. We both have thirsts to slake.

She had not uttered a word. Could this thing read her thoughts? It must have. It had slid into her head somehow. This worried her, but what could she do about it?

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Your father owes my father, the Long Walker thought-spoke in her mind.

The trees petered out. They came to an empty field. An encampment of some kind was set up not far away. Petty could see lights winking—brightly colored ones, blinking and circling…

They skimmed across the grass. A traveling carnival came into view. Shaky old rides, a midway, caravans where the workers slept. They circled the carnival’s perimeter where the light was weak, a pair of wolves scoping things out. They passed a caravan; Petty caught a snatch of a familiar jingle playing on a transistor radio hanging from its open window on a strap:

“We’re gonna make a… hot cereal lover outta you! With ready-to-serve Quaker Oatmeal—you did it!”

Cars were parked on a strip of beaten earth not far from the ticket taker’s booth. There were Monte Carlos and Dodges and pickup trucks with bales of hay in their beds. Beyond the cars Petty saw a string of shotgun shacks lining a paved road; they must be near one of the little towns ringing her home, places with names like Mescalero and Pecos and Elephant Butte. Elephant Butte attracts flies, her mother used to joke, even though it was pronounced beaut, not butt. Petty was sure the people of Elephant Butte were nice—people generally were around here: they worked and scraped their knuckles raw and drank too much and prayed away their sins every Sunday at church.

They skirted the midway, where grizzled-looking hucksters called out “One play, one win!” and “Test your luck for half a buck!” Rain dripped from the awnings of the ring toss and whack-a-mole booths. The Long Walker pulled her toward a striped tent. Light spilled from under its canopy and shone through eyelets where no ropes had been strung. They stopped a ways from the open flaps at the back, getting a view of its insides. Thirty or forty people were seated on folding chairs, facing away from Petty. Most of them were dressed simply, in sun-bleached frocks or overalls. A lot of the men had pipe holsters threaded through their hand-tooled leather belts, with their smoking pipes looped through them.

Everyone was focused on the man who stood on a raised stage in front. A preacher. It was not uncommon to find lay preachers peddling old-time religion from town to town around here—some people just couldn’t get enough. If there was a midweek opportunity for a top-up, they jumped at it. Strange to find a preacher at a carnival, but maybe some of these folk felt the urge to atone after too much cotton candy and spins on the Tilt-A-Whirl.

The preacher was tall and bony and what Petty’s mom would have called onion-eyed—meaning they bulged from his sockets like pearl onions—but he spoke with great conviction.

“…and many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and never-ending contempt!” he thundered as he strode across the stage. “Hell! That’s right, that eternal place of damnation where you will go if you are not right with God when you perish. That’s right—Hell is a real place! And you will be sent there, sure as shooting, if you do not obey the Lord’s commandments!”

The congregants swayed in their seats. Rain pattered on the tent and dripped to the earth in ragged streamers.

“What of God’s promise of eternal life? There are conditions of that promise! Whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life, the Good Book says. So we must believe in Him. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up!” The preacher stabbed an accusing finger at his audience. “My question to you, my good Christian neighbors, is this: Are you lifting the Son of man up as Moses lifted the serpent, or are you wandering around the wilderness?”

The Long Walker pulled a flute from the folds of its duster. It looked as if it was made out of a bone—perhaps a human one. It held it to its lips. The notes the flute made weren’t harmonious… but they were compelling. Petty turned toward the Long Walker instinctively, the same way a moth was drawn to a bug zapper.

The children in the tent turned, too. There were only five or six, but they all looked back. The adults didn’t take the slightest notice. A child seated in the back row—a girl of four or five—stood. She had been sitting on the aisle beside her mother. Nobody saw her walk out of the tent into the spitting rain.

The little girl strode right up to the Long Walker. A shy smile touched the edges of her heart-shaped mouth. But her eyes were huge with fear and her shoulders were set way back, as if every part of her was repulsed. The Long Walker whispered to her. Petty imagined how its voice would feel sliding into her ear—she pictured a thin, unbreakable icicle. The girl giggled. The Long Walker reached out and touched the girl on the tip of her upturned nose. She covered her mouth as if the Long Walker had said a dirty word. The flesh of her nose was beginning to blister already; after the ensuing chaos had ebbed, her mother would pale when she noticed the very tip of her daughter’s nose had gone the cracked gray of an old, unwrapped piece of liver forgotten in a freezer for months. The girl walked back into the tent.

“Now, what the Loooooord wants,” the preacher thundered on, “is for you to pay the tariff! The wages of sin, ladies and gents, is a high price indeed—”

“He touched me.”

The preacher stopped midsentence. The little girl’s voice cut through his sermon. She stood in the middle of the center aisle with her finger pointed at the holy man.

“The preacher. He touched me in my dirty spot.” Her finger dipped down and down until it pointed between her legs.

The congregation rumbled. The men—most of them with thick, sunburned necks and brush-cut hair—began to redden as their jaws went tense.

“I did no such—” A low moan escaped the preacher, who had turned pale as cottage cheese. “Oh God! Lies, lies!”

The Long Walker made a noise that could have been laughter. The men had begun to rise, their fists balling at their hips. The preacher was frantic, rung by all those blood-hungry faces.

“No! No, I… Where is this girl’s mother? Her father?” he said desperately. “They will tell you I did no such—”

“She was lost from my sight for five minutes,” a woman in the back row said hollowly. “I have never lost track of her before, not once until tonight…”

“Let’s draw and quarter the turd,” a voice called out from the rear of the tent.

The Long Walker’s face was fixed in an expression Petty could not read. It might even have been sadness.

The men advanced on the preacher, who raised his hands skyward in silent plea. The first man who reached him threw a fist with pure venom; the preacher’s nose exploded. He fell. The men and more than a few women then fell upon him, kicking and stomping.

“Enough,” the Long Walker said, sounding bored.

He took Petty’s hand and led her away from the pandemonium.

2

THE GREYHOUND PULLED OVER on the side of the road at a quarter past five in the afternoon. Micah exited under a sun hazed with the grit lifting off the breakdown lane.

“Town’s a mile or so thataway,” the driver said, pointing.

Micah shouldered his bag. He had to stop himself from running. After that encounter in the woods, his first instinct had been to set off on foot after the thing that had snatched his daughter. But the creature would outdistance him easily, or back-flank him and kill him… or do something much worse.

Micah knew Petty would not be killed. She had been taken to establish Micah’s purpose, his end goal. Aside from his wife, his daughter was the only person capable of compelling Micah to retrace his steps back… there. And the black thing knew Micah’s heart as well as Micah did himself—better, just maybe.

He had hired a caretaker for Ellen, his wife. He had done so before on occasions when he needed to be away. Ellen’s sister, Sherri, was usually available, but was out of town at present. When Sherri returned, she would take over the caregiver role. Ellen posed only the smallest of burdens. She lay in bed. Occasionally she would rise, eyes open but seeing nothing, lips trembling with words Micah couldn’t quite understand, and pace the bedroom, vanity to door to nightstand. Her comatose state was unaffected. The doctors said this was uncommon behavior, but not unique. Her bedsores often burst during these episodes. Micah would trail her as she walked, dabbing ointment on her sores. The bedroom door was always locked at these times. There was no need for Petty to see her mother that way. Better to remember her as she’d been.

He hired a man to feed and water the animals. By all rights, his crops should die in his absence. But they would thrive. It had made Micah a wealthy man, the envy of those who eked a living out of the same inhospitable soil. But he was no crop whisperer. His fields produced simply because that was part of the deal—and that deal carried terrible penalties, too.

The town of Old Ditch seemed comatose. The industry had moved on, and with it went the hope, and with that went the incentive for the citizenry to improve. The buildings were stooped and tumbledown, as though affected with a case of architectural leprosy. A fine layer of dust had settled over the shop windows. A piebald dog dashed across the main street, through an intersection where the stoplights had gone dead.

Micah stopped in at a diner devoid of customers. The revolving pastry case displayed its unappealing wares: a lemon meringue pie so old the whipped eggs had cracked like the mud in a dry riverbed. A flyswatter lay on the countertop; below the swatter lay the smashed remains of the insects it had squashed.

A man’s face appeared in the kitchen pass. Old, fatigued, a grease-spotted fry hat cocked on his head at a defeated angle.

“What’ll you have?”

Micah set a dubious eye on the deformed pie, the coffee gone bitter on the burner.

“I am looking for a man.”

“We don’t traffic in that kind of business around here.”

“He is English. Black. Speaks with an accent.”

“There’s only one man in town has one of those.”

“Where can I find him?”

The man wiped his nose. “Sure you don’t want something? Hash is the specialty of the house.”

Salmonella is the specialty of this house, Micah thought.

“Just the man and where I can find him.”

Half an hour later, Micah had walked to the end of a narrow street lined with derelict dwellings. He spotted a blank, sun-challenged face peering at him from an upper-story window. The piebald dog moped along after him, flinching whenever Micah turned to face it. He rooted half of a 7-Eleven sticky bun out of his pack and dropped it. The dog ate it with that same flinching fear, as if under the suspicion that the treat was poisoned—as if it had witnessed its fellow pooches die that very way, in moaning paroxysms on the street.

The house he arrived at was small, but in better condition than the others. Micah knocked. Footsteps shuffled to the door.

“Who’s calling?”

“It is me, Ebenezer.”

A pause. A considerable one. The door opened. Ebenezer Elkins stood in a housecoat knotted chastely at the waist. His right hand was bandaged. He was drinking. He appeared to have been doing so for some time.

He bowed and stepped aside. “Come in.”

The main room was unadorned. The walls were bare save for the crucifixes hung at every corner. A small bookshelf with books that appeared to have been well read. Demons in America—that title jumped out at Micah.

Eb gestured to one of two chairs before taking a seat in the other. His bottle sat by the chair leg. He poured himself a splash.

“Where are my manners?” he said, gesturing with the bottle.

Micah consented. Eb limped into the kitchen and returned with a glass. He poured for Micah.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Years,” said Eb.

“Looks like you just moved in.”

“It does, doesn’t it.” Eb blearily stared around. His eyes were bloodshot, but he did not seem especially drunk. “I suppose I never expected to be here this long.”

“Are you well?”

“Not especially. Thank you for asking. You?”

“Not really. What did you do to your hand?”

Eb waved the question away. They sat for a spell, drinking in silence.

“Have you come to kill me?” Eb asked.

Micah shook his head.

“I didn’t think so,” said Ebenezer. “I thought you would be coming soon. I… Believe it or not, I dreamt it. Which may sound ridiculous—or it would have at one point in our lives. Superstitious drivel.”

He refilled their glasses. The hooch was strong, cheap, with a wicked burn.

“Lot of crucifixes,” Micah remarked.

“I got a deal on them. Cheaper by the dozen.”

“The Ebenezer I knew did not have much use for them.”

Ebenezer looked at his feet. Each of them had spent the past fifteen years trying to unbecome the man the other had once known.

“It took my daughter,” Micah said.

Eb looked up sharply. “You have a daughter?”

“By Ellen, yes. Petty. Ellen’s naming. Pet is her common name.”

“Ellen. How is she?”

Micah said, “She is at home and untroubled.”

Eb’s brows knitted. “Her daughter is gone and she is untroubled?”

“She is unaware of the loss.”

The Englishman pursued it no further. “You have a daughter,” he said again, disbelievingly. “Jesus Christ.”

Micah said, “It took her two nights ago, in the woods edging my home. I encountered one of the handmaids. But the other one, the more dangerous one…”

“The Flute Player.”

Micah nodded. “If you wish to call it that. It took my Pet.”

“How do you know?”

“I heard its song on the wind,” said Micah. “It wanted me to hear.”

“And it’s taking her back to…?”

“Where else?”

Eb dropped his head again. His body appeared to deflate. His breath came heavy, as a man’s does just before he’s about to heave up his guts.

“Bloody fucking hell. I thought we ended all that,” he rasped. “It almost killed us all, and it certainly wrecked the three of us going forward, but… I thought we put that to bed for good and all.”

Micah did not fault the Englishman his belief. But was the thing they encountered in the woods ringing Little Heaven—the real terror, lurking within the black rock… Could such a thing truly be mastered by the hand of man? Or had they shackled it for only a brief while—years for them, for itself the mere blink of an eye—and given it time to heal, to plot, and to nurse its rage?

“I need your help,” Micah said quietly. “I would never ask, except…”

Ebenezer did not stir for quite some time. When at last he looked up, his eyes were still bloodshot, but there was only a slight quaver in his gaze. “I’ll need to pack some things.”

Ebenezer got up. He went into the bedroom. He shut the door and closed his eyes. He didn’t want Micah to see the way he slept. His bed was a single mattress on the floor. One sheet, no pillow. Micah didn’t need to see Ebenezer’s crucifix collection, either. Dozens of them. On every wall. Hung from the ceiling on loops of fishing line. Ebenezer himself had drawn crude crosses with charcoal pencils, scratching them onto the walls between the nailed-up crucifixes. Even though he did not believe in God—even though the god he saw when he closed his eyes was a leering idiot—the crosses comforted him in some odd fashion.

Ebenezer tried to sleep during the day; he found it easier to surrender consciousness with sunlight streaming into the room. But he was a hair-trigger sleeper; the sound of an ant pissing on cotton batting was enough to wake him up these days. He hadn’t slept—really slept—in fifteen years.

At night, he paced the house and stared out at the street, or surveyed the empty fields from his kitchen window. In the deepest hours of night he saw, or believed he could see, undefined shapes cavorting where the night was thinnest—just beyond the glow of the streetlights, or at the edges of the moonlight where it played over the barren grassland.

Things waiting. Things watching. Hungering.

Sometimes at night, Ebenezer slipped into a fitful doze. His system would just crap out like an old radiator. Then the dreams would come. Not just the one where he saw God’s face. That one was bad enough. This other dream was even worse.

In that dream he was trapped beneath the earth in a place where no light ever shone. He had been there before. In that darkness—so absolute he felt it attaching to his skin, pulling the blood out of his veins and the very sight out of his eyes—he could hear things. Terrible things. Sucking sounds. And other, subtler tones made worse by how delicate they were. That of flesh being pulled apart, maybe… which is not a very loud noise at all, though one might think it ought to be. Rending flesh carries its own note, which sounds like no other—a little like silk sheets slit apart with a scalpel.

In the dream, he stood in that clotted darkness, surrounded by the moist sucking, ripping, and the high breathless inhales a person makes when ice water is poured down the back of their necks. Taken together, they were almost sexual. The ecstatic, groveling noises of sexual climax.

Wending through these sounds, riding an alternate sonic register, was a note composed of many tiny voices threaded together…

…and it sounded like the laughter of children.

Ebenezer stood in his room surrounded by flea market crucifixes and began to shake, his body wracked with uncontrollable shivers. He hugged himself and bit his lip until blood squirted. His knees went out, and he collapsed to the floor silently, not wanting Micah to come in and see him this way. He laid his head on the floor.

You have no choice, he told himself. You have to go. Pull yourself together, for the love of Christendom.

He got the shakes under control. He stood, jelly-legged. He wiped away the blood. It was all right to be scared. Any man would be.

He pushed the mattress aside and prized up two floorboards. He pulled up a familiar beechwood box.

“Hello again, ladies.”

His Mauser pistols. A few loose bullets rolled around in the bottom of the box. The guns would need oiling, and he would need more ammunition. A great deal of it.

He dressed in faded jeans and a white V-neck T-shirt. He packed a bag with underwear, socks, shirts, and some trousers. The pistols went in the bag, too.

He took a crucifix off the wall. A four-inch Jesus with a tarnished copper face was nailed to the crossbeams.

“In you go, sport,” Ebenezer said, slipping it into his bag.

He stepped into the hall and shut the door behind him. Micah was still in the chair right where Ebenezer had left him.

Micah said, “You coming, then?”

“You think I got all dressed up just to stay here?”

“You probably will not come back, Eb. Neither you or me.”

Eb nodded. “It is probable.”

“Well. Thanks.”

“Oh well. I’ve lived long enough.”

They went outside. Ebenezer left the front door wide open.

“Need to say your good-byes to anybody before we go?” said Micah.

Ebenezer shook his head. “My creditors can seek redress with my next of kin, if they can be found. Now, how did you get here?”

“Took the bus.”

“Ah. I don’t have a car.”

“We can rent one.”

“Not in this town we can’t.”

They walked down the street. Micah walked slowly to allow his limping companion to keep stride. The sunshine imparted a pleasant tickle on their skin. The piebald dog resumed its pursuit.

“We could steal a car,” said Ebenezer. “That could be fun.”

“Either way.”

Eb sighed. “I imagine we’re off to find Minerva?”

“Yes.”

“Do you imagine she’s expecting us?”

“Were you expecting me?”

“Yes.”

“Then yes.”

Eb sighed again. “I don’t imagine she’ll be terrifically pleased to see us.”

“Pleased or not, we are coming.”

3

MINERVA FIGURED it was high time to try and hang herself again.

She couldn’t remember when or where the last time had been—the attempts all blended together after a while. Anyway, why not? She had no other plans for the afternoon.

Another town, another ratbag motel room. The Double Diamond Inn, this time. New Mexico was littered with shitholes just like it. The mattress was thirty years old and probably saturated with a thousand dreary cumshots milked from the nutsacks of basset-faced johns by one dead-eyed whore or another. And here Minny was, sitting on the mattress. Buoyed up on a cushion of grim, dried-up old sperm.

Minerva tended to get moody before a suicide attempt. It was tough to see the rosy side of life. But perhaps there had been happiness in this room, too. A young couple could have passed a night in this dump on their way to another city, a better life. Maybe their first child had been conceived in this very bed and had gone on to invent the floppy disk or star in an off-Broadway play or some shit. Who could say?

The noose was fashioned out of stout nautical rope. She had pulled a ceiling panel loose and knotted the rope around an exposed pipe. She sat on the bed, staring up at it.

She had a forty-ouncer of rye. Bathtub-grade shit, just slightly more pure than Sterno. She would drink as much as she could, then clamber up on the chair and stuff her head through the noose. Kick the chair away, la-di-da, carefree as a bird. Say good night, Gracie.

But there was a chance—a perfectly good one—that she’d come to a few minutes later, her pants heavy after her bowels had involuntarily loosened and the whites of her eyes gone red with hemorrhaging. If so, she’d cut herself down and get on with her day.

She had drunk the neck out of the bottle when someone knocked on the door.

Shit. Fucking hellfire.

It wasn’t the cops. It never was. She had killed three men in a bar, two days and five hundred miles ago. Afterward, she had driven away. Nobody had pursued her. Nobody ever did.

It wasn’t the fact that the men she had killed in that bar were themselves killers and, as such, didn’t exactly inspire the police to discover who had ended their lives. When a mad dog kills another mad dog, the dogcatcher still pursues the murderous hound under the suspicion that it might kill an innocent creature next. And it was not that Minerva had left no trace. She had shot the men with witnesses present.

No, the cops did not give chase because that was part of the deal. She had made one discrete wish, but with it came all manner of consequence, unknown to her at the time. It wasn’t just that she had to live with the killing she’d done—it was the lack of comeuppance for having done it.

She had killed… Jesus, how many? Twenty? Twenty men over the past fifteen years. Twenty souls gone to heaven or hell or just vaporized, blown to some other part of the continuum on the cosmic winds. The people she had killed were bad in a basic sense, pollutants whose dismissal off the food chain was mourned by a precious few, but still. Nobody ever came sniffing after her. She went wherever she wanted and left whenever she desired. Her life was free of consequence or reprisal. She had spent not a single day in jail. She had been called in for questioning on occasion, spent a few hours in the stir, but inevitably a detective would tell her that she was free to go.

“What if I did it?” she’d asked one of them once.

“You didn’t do it,” the detective had said, as if reciting some boring middle-school fact, his face blank as a test pattern.

The knock came again. Insistently. Minerva set the bottle down. Her pistols lay on the bed. She reached for one.

“Who calls?” she said in a falsetto.

“It is Micah Shughrue, Minerva.”

A profound coldness invaded her chest. Minny gritted her teeth and waited for it to pass.

“You standing in front of the door?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why? You think I’d try to shoot you through it?”

Silence.

She put the gun down and got up. She opened the door a crack. Then she sat back on the bed. The door opened a few more inches. Micah slid his head through the gap.

“Do come in,” Minerva said primly. “Splendiferous beauty awaits you.”

His gaze made a quick circuit of the room; then he twigged on the noose.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“How did you find me?” she said, ignoring the question.

“Caught your scent on the wind.”

Micah didn’t need to explain. Although she hadn’t exactly known he was coming, Minerva wasn’t surprised. She always had a sense of where he’d been these past years—and the black sonofabitch, too, who had to be nearby. She never knew their precise coordinates, but all she had to do was close her eyes and concentrate. Little by little, their presence would start to ping. Seems they now each had the same ability, thanks to what had happened. All any of them needed to do was track those pings to their source.

“Hey!” she said. “You out there?”

“I am,” Ebenezer called out.

“You scared of me?”

“A smidge.”

Minerva sighed inwardly. When she considered the damage she had done over the last fifteen years to her fellow human beings—to those who deserved it, and some who had not quite been deserving—well, it would be disingenuous to say she and Ebenezer were not now peas from the same pod.

“Get your ass in here.”

Eb’s head poked around the door frame. He limped inside.

“Minny,” he said.

“Shithead,” she said flatly.

Ebenezer said, “Charmed, I’m sure.”

He, too, scoped the noose. His eyebrow ticked up. Minny swallowed more rye whiskey. What the fuck did she care what they thought?

“You boys made it in time for the show. Which one of you wants to kick the chair out from under me?”

The men hung their heads, unwilling to meet her eyes. Were they actually embarrassed for her? Well, screw them both. And the horses they rode in on.

“Okay, then. Get the fuck out of here if you’re not going to be useful.”

Micah turned his cold eye on her. A point of light sparked in the center of his remaining pupil. “You think I showed up to watch you hang yourself?”

“I don’t know why you showed up,” Minerva said sullenly. “You followed the wrong Bat Signal, Boy Wonders.”

Micah went into the bathroom. She heard him unwrap a plastic cup from its wax paper cover. Next, running water. When Micah came back, his glass eye was missing. He crossed to the dresser. A crumpled Burger King bag sat beside the portable TV. A few salt packets were scattered beside the bag.

“You need these?” Micah asked.

Minerva shook her head. Micah ripped the packets open and spilled salt into the water. He gave it a stir with his finger to dissolve the crystals.

He leaned forward until the rim of the cup encircled his empty socket. He tipped his head back, holding the cup in place. He shook his head and hissed as the salt water cured the flesh inside his empty socket. Then he brought his head down and took the cup away. Water dripped out of his socket onto the grimy motel shag. He dabbed away the excess water with a napkin.

He then pulled the glass eye from his duster pocket and dropped it into the cup. It sat in the bottom like an olive in a martini. He swirled it around, then fished it out and put it back in.

“Good?” he asked Minerva.

“A little bit to the…”

Micah adjusted the glass eye with his finger.

Minerva said, “Yeah, that’ll do.”

Micah sat on the bed beside her. Ebenezer watched from the doorway.

“I need your help.”

Minerva was surprised. Micah Shughrue wasn’t one to ask for anything. He was the sort of man who would track down the doctor who’d delivered him just to repay the debt.

He said, “I have a daughter.”

Minerva’s surprise deepened. “You have a daughter?”

“Isn’t life a cavalcade of wonderments?” Ebenezer said.

Micah said, “By Ellen.”

Ellen. The woman who’d dragged them into it. Dragged them straight to hell.

Minerva said, “So are you sore at me for not showing up to the baby shower?”

“It has taken her.”

The coldness Minerva had felt earlier intensified a hundredfold—layers of ice crystalizing inside the ventricles of her heart.

“Oh, Micah… are you sure? She didn’t run away? Young girls make a bad habit of that.”

“He encountered one of them in the woods,” Ebenezer said. “The handmaids. The ones stitched together out of scraps. But it was the other one who took his daughter.”

The other one, Minerva thought grimly. The Piper. The Son. Whatever you wanted to call it. How could Micah be so calm?

“It will not hurt her,” Micah said. “It is taking her back to act as…”

“Bait, right.” Minerva’s head nodded numbly, automatically. “Yeah. Makes sense. No way any one of us would go back willingly.”

Minerva dropped her head. She closed her eyes. The room tilted on its axis.

“And you need me, why?” she said. “What can I do? Any of us? I’m so sorry for your daughter. But we barely survived last time, and that was a long time ago. I’m a damn sight worse now than I was then.”

Micah said, “You look okay. Apart from the drink.”

“And the noose,” said Ebenezer.

She tried to smile. “I’m used up. And I’m… I’m scared, Shug.”

“Well. So am I.”

She looked up. Micah was placidly regarding her.

“You?”

He nodded. “Not so much for myself, but yes, I am scared.”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I honestly might not be any use to you.”

“Cry me a river,” Ebenezer said.

“What was that?” Minerva said icily.

“Are you the only one who harbors fear in your heart?” Eb mordantly chuckled. “I am as broken as ever I’ve been. My own shadow on the wall scares me most nights.”

“So go,” Minny said. “Who’s stopping you?”

Ebenezer shook his head. “I pegged you as many things, my dear. But never once did I peg you for a coward.”

Minerva cut her eyes at him. He met her gaze. A challenge. She dropped her head and waved a dismissive hand.

“Sell it walking.” She flipped a switch inside her mind, her eyes going hard. “Take your crazy somewhere else.”

Micah stood. Minerva thought he might try to press her, but that had never been his way. They would go without her. And die wretchedly in the dark. But they would go. Ebenezer might quit when the madness got too much—and it would, as sure as breathing—but Micah would wade right in until it stole everything he had to give.

“There a bar around here?” Micah said.

“There’s one jutting off the ass end of this motel,” she told him.

“I think he meant one where the cockroaches don’t have name tags,” said Ebenezer.

“It will do,” said Micah.

She waved her hand again. “Go on, then. Scat.”

They did. The door shut behind them. She sat in the shadow of the noose. She ran her hand over her freshly shorn scalp. She always liked to get a buzz cut before trying to snip her mortal cord. She had this weird fear that some shitty, unscrupulous undertaker would sell her hair to a wig shop. Stupid, the things people worry about. She shut her eyes—but something leapt up, a long-forgotten shape that shone a delirious bone white in the darkness behind her eyelids. She jolted, opening them.

“I can’t. Christ. I can’t do it again.”

She dropped a dime in the box bolted onto the TV. It bought her a couple minutes of flickery black and white. She needed the distraction. Micah and Ebenezer were in the bar now, waiting for her to change her mind. She had to hold out. One drink and they would surely leave.

She tuned in to an episode of The Waltons. Usually this kind of saccharine shit made her teeth ache, but right now it was just what the doctor ordered.

“Good night, John-Boy, you pig-fucking little bastard,” she muttered.

A commercial came on.

“What’s inside this little blue egg that keeps Barbara Eden looking slim and trim?” asked the jovial announcer.

“Who gives a flying fuck,” Minerva said.

“Oh, there’s only one answer to that—it’s L’eggs control-top panty hose! L’eggs slims and trims but doesn’t bind, so you get comfort and control!”

The meter clicked. The screen blinked out. Minerva went to drop in another dime. She stopped. She swore she could see something in the smoky square of the dead TV. Something jesting and capering…

Human fears obeyed a hierarchy. Minerva had discovered that as a girl. She had never been as scared as on that sunny afternoon when her brother was taken by that snake. Her fear had held different layers: the helplessness, the heaving revulsion, the understanding that the world could yawn open at any time and take what was most precious. That afternoon—those few minutes within it, dominated by the sound of the snake’s mouth opening to ingest her still-breathing brother, so much like the stretching of a thousand wet rubber bands… Minerva never thought she would know a terror to rival it.

Her belief had stood until one night in Little Heaven, when she rounded the edge of the chapel to spy a boy sitting cross-legged in the moonlight. The darkness twitched all around him, moving with a trillion sightless eyes. The boy turned, knowing she was there though unable to see her. He smiled—so sweet, so innocent—with his eyes the color of smoke. He was holding something in his hands. Beyond him lay the feasting darkness of the woods. From behind the trees had come the sound of something consuming its prey… but not in any natural way.

Minerva sank down on the bed. It was there again. That old squirming fear creeping up her legs like gangrene. It got inside and ate you from within, squandered and reduced you until you were helpless to fight it. That kind of fear could ruin you—you and those around you, too, because you were no use to anyone with that dread lodged in your heart.

She sat for a few minutes, thinking. Was she seriously going to do it? Was she actually contemplating hurling herself back into that horror?

She was just a sack of skin. That was how she saw it. Hell, that’s all anyone was. She was a sack, and Micah was a sack, and Ebenezer—oh, he was definitely a sack. Billions of sacks colliding with one another every goddamn day. Sometimes two of them collided and something good came of it. Sometimes two or three or more collided and something awful happened. But that’s all life was—sacks of skin bumbling around, bumping into their fellow sacks, and stuff happening.

But she had to admit that Micah Shughrue, ole Shug, he was about the best sack of skin she’d ever bumped into. That said, she owed them nothing. Not the Englishman, for damn sure. Not even Micah. The debts still due were their own.

But then, what else did she have? What was her life? She killed people. She was denied the mercy of death. She woke up screaming more nights than not. She owed, and she was paying. Maybe it was finally time to follow that line back. Pay a visit to her old benefactor. Renegotiate their deal.

Isn’t my life hell anyway? Minerva thought. Isn’t that why I want to die?

There are worse hells than this, a voice whispered softly in her ear.

4

SHE FOUND THEM in the bar.

“I’ll come.”

Micah said, “Okay.”

“Don’t go getting all dewy-eye on me, Shug.”

Micah said, “Okay.”