Micah fired. The bullet tore a chunk off. The thing squealed in a half dozen pitches with as many mouths. It continued toward them, faster now.
“Oh God,” said Otis. “Let’s go go oh no oh no let’s goooo—”
Minerva aimed and fired. Four shots, each one finding its mark. Gouts of blood—or whatever the thing was full of—spurted wildly. It did not stop. She could smell it now. The reek of spoiled meat and fricasseed hair.
The fire licked downward to spread around the belled shape of its body. It looked like the grass skirt of a hula dancer that had leapt up in flame.
Micah picked up the lantern and tossed it thirty feet ahead of them, directly in the thing’s path. “Shoot it,” he told Minerva. “The kerosene tank.”
Minerva steadied herself and fired. The bullet raised a burr of dirt six inches left of the lantern.
The thing neared the lantern. Eight yards, seven, six…
She fired again. The slug struck a half-buried rock and whined off target.
She fired again. A dry click. The gun was empty. She glanced at Micah, stricken.
He unloaded with the Tarpley, firing from the hip. The carbine boomed. The lantern flipped end over end, spraying kerosene onto the thing. It went up with a roar. Flames rose along the tortured slag heap of its body as flesh melted off in thick gobbets. It made noises that should be heard only in hell. Its many mouths screamed and bleated as its limbs swung spastically.
Charlie clambered out of the tent. He watched with numb horror as the thing toppled onto its side and lay there, squealing and hissing. Nobody could tell if the noises it made were the product of its mouths or the sound of its untold organs rupturing and popping from the heat. In time, it stopped moving.
Micah approached the creature. Minerva clenched her jaw and followed him. She couldn’t believe she had missed the lantern… twice. She had made shots like that a thousand times. She could pick tin cans off a fence post at forty yards. But it’s different when your back’s up against it. Your cool crumbles. You fuck-up.
The body still smoked. It was already softening into the earth. Its configuration was lunatic. It was made out of different animals, a mishmash of species. Fish, fowl, insects, beasts of the woods. All melted together. Every one of its faces—fox and deer and pheasant and coyote and otter—was wrenched into an expression of tortured despair. Everywhere Minerva looked, some awful horror greeted her. Here, a clutch of bats’ heads sprouting from the mouth of a gray wolf. There, a naked rib cage housing the flayed remains of a squirrel, its innards studded with a half dozen eyeballs that had burst in the flame. A blackened ball of ants compressed to the density of a baseball hanging on a strip of organ meat.
Minerva saw the melted remains of what looked to be a dog collar. Had this thing eaten one of Little Heaven’s dogs?
Micah lifted the flap of skin that shielded its means of locomotion. Minerva gagged. How could he stand to touch the thing? The stinking flap rose to reveal dozens of legs. This was how it moved, trundling about with its limbs hidden as though beneath a hoop skirt.
Micah let the flap fall. There came a rude farting noise as a bladder let go inside the thing. The shock was so profound that nobody could speak for some time.
“This is the devil’s work,” Otis finally said. His arms wouldn’t stop shaking.
Minerva checked her watch. It was coming up on five o’clock. The light of dawn was flirting through the trees.
“We have to go back to Little Heaven,” said Otis. “Warn the others.”
Micah and Minerva shared a look. Do we? But they did. She cared nothing for the Englishman, but Ellen and the others did not deserve to be abandoned.
She gazed down the path that led to their car. It looked wide and safe—a hop, skip, and a jump and they would be back at the main road.
But then something stirred. Her breath grated in her lungs.
She pointed. “Look.”
They were out there. Strung all through the woods. Shapes. Some big, others more compact. Some shaggy, others sleek. All unmoving as sentinels.
Micah said, “Grab what you can. Quickly.”
25
EARLY IN THE MORNING, before anyone else was up, Reverend Amos Flesher crossed the square to the bunkhouse where the boy was being kept.
Virgil was asleep on a chair outside. Both he and Cyril refused to be inside the windowless bunkhouse with the boy—not together, and certainly not alone.
Amos kicked Virgil’s foot. The man cracked one eyelid open.
“Yeah?”
“Did you hear anything out of him?”
Virgil licked his lips, which were cracked because he sucked air through his mouth when he slept. Mouth-breathers was what Sister Muriel called the children who did that.
“He must have slept like a baby,” said Virgil. “I didn’t hear a peep.”
Amos nodded. “Wait here.”
“You’re fucking-A right. I sure as hell ain’t going in there.”
Virgil spoke flippantly, but the whites of his eyes quivered like undercooked eggs. Amos set his hand on the doorknob and took a breath.
The Lord love me, save me, and preserve me. Amen.
The bunkhouse was a single room. Eli Rathbone lay in bed. Uncovered in only his underwear. He looked to have not shifted an inch since Amos had last seen him. But his feet were filthy. Covered in dirt and pine needles. They had been clean the last time Amos had seen them—the Reverend was positive of that.
Amos moved cautiously, not wanting to wake the boy. Eli’s chest barely moved. Had he died in his sleep? Perhaps that would be for the best. Yes, all things considered, it just might be. The Lord’s will be done.
Eli’s chest hitched and fell. A ghost of a smile graced his lips.
Amos’s jaw clenched. Adrenaline flared in him. He did not like being near this boy. There was something unseemly about his wasted frame and ashen hair.
Dr. Lewis refused to tend to him any more than he already had. It was all Amos could do to prevent the simpering boob from fleeing into the square in fright after… the earlier unpleasantness. The man was supposed to be a doctor, wasn’t he? A healer of men. He couldn’t even hack the sight of a sick boy.
Granted, the boy was sick in a peculiar way. And granted, Amos wasn’t entirely comfortable around him, either.
There was a stain on the floor a few feet from the bed. Amos gave it a wide berth. Silly. It was only the boy’s blood. The same blood that pumped through the veins of every man, woman, and child at Little Heaven. Except it hadn’t looked like blood when it had come out of the boy the other night. At that time, it had been black and thick as ichor.
It was Lewis who had made the incision. Amos had been the sole witness to it. He had banished everyone from the bunkhouse—he didn’t want anyone else seeing the boy. It would cause alarm. Two of the outsiders had found Eli behind the chapel. The black fairy and the bald-headed lezbo. Amos had actually watched them cross the square in the dead of night; he had been up at the time, listening to the Voice. It had bothered him—nobody should be out at such an hour—but they would all be gone as soon as the black one’s ankle healed. Minutes later, Amos witnessed them stumble around the chapel, their eyes wide with horror.
What the Reverend had then found behind the chapel nearly unhinged him. Pewter-eyed Eli Rathbone immersed in a sea of squirming insects, cradling a dead bird. Glimpsing the boy’s young-old face as his ears had filled with the quarrelsome hiss of the bugs—it conjured within Amos a fear that infested him like a sickness: the sight infected his soul, shriveling it like a slug doused with salt.