You tell yourself it’s just a caterpillar. The world’s full of them. Which is true. But the world is full of us, too. And any of us can be lost—or taken—at any minute.
Micah thought about endings. Some were abrupt, like the way that caterpillar’s life had ceased. Some took longer, and you could see them coming from miles off. In so many ways, Micah wanted it to end. He felt every one of his years. He was old and bone-weary. His body ached; his mind was plagued. Everything he loved had been ripped from him, and he deserved it. Guilt and regret were different qualities, yes, but still tightly wed. You could not outrun your past. Your history was a lonely hound pursuing you over field and fallow, never resting, always hungry, tracking you relentlessly until one night you heard its nails scratching at your door.
I am coming, Pet, he thought. Please just hold on a little longer. If I can, you can.
PART SIX
THE DEVIL IN THE ROCK
1966
1
NATE WAS STILL AWAKE. Everyone else was asleep.
Only a few hours had passed since the one-eyed man had come back. He and Mr. Redhill and Mr. Fairweather and Mr. Langtree had gone off in the truck to get help. They hadn’t made it far. In fact, they were still within earshot when Nate heard Mr. Redhill start to scream. He thought it had been Mr. Redhill, anyway. It was too dark to see, the truck too far away by then, and anyway, when people scream—even full-grown men—they all tend to sound the same. That wasn’t something Nate would have guessed, but he could say so now. Only the one-eyed man had returned to Little Heaven alive.
Now Nate was in the mess hall with his father, the three outsiders, and Ellen—she had told him her name, so she wasn’t an outsider to him anymore. A bigger group was over in the supply warehouse. A few stragglers were standing watch at the gate.
After the one-eyed man came back, a lot of people tried to get into the chapel. Sanctuary was the word Nate had heard. But the chapel was locked. The Reverend wouldn’t answer his door, either. What did it matter? Nobody cared what the Reverend had to say now. It’s about time, Nate thought. He had never really liked Reverend Flesher. He reminded Nate of a door-to-door salesman: he spread out his wares on your living room rug, and they weren’t much good, all scuffed and cheaply made, but he pressured you to buy them anyway. Nate was glad the Reverend had lost some of his control. Nate could say that now, couldn’t he? Sure. He could say or think almost anything. And that was a scary thought.
Everyone had questions for the one-eyed man, too. A lot of those questions had been screamed into the one-eyed man’s face, and they were less questions than accusations. He didn’t answer any of them. It was as if whatever had happened out there had temporarily melted his brain. That was a scary thought, too, because the one-eyed man seemed tough. Steel-belted, his mom would say. If whatever had happened out there was bad enough to do that to him, Nate figured it had to be really bad.
One thing was for sure: nobody wanted to step past the gates. The only thing they could do was take cover and wait until morning. Everyone was praying that whatever was in the woods—the things that had killed Mr. Langtree and Mr. Fairweather and Billy and Elton’s dad—wouldn’t enter Little Heaven. It was whispered that they must be afraid of the lights—but with the gasoline dwindling, who knew how much longer the lights would stay on.
Now everyone had split up and made their way either to the warehouse or the mess. The watchers at the gate had whistles in case they saw anything. Nate’s dad wanted to sleep in the warehouse with Maude Redhill and the others, but Nate wanted to stay with the outsiders. He trusted them. Plus, they had more guns. His father gave him a look but said that God would abide.
So they settled in the mess hall. The Englishman was appointed as first watch. The adults quickly fell asleep—even the Englishman. Someone might as well have slipped a knockout drop under their tongues.
But Nate couldn’t sleep. Something awful was happening—had been happening for a while now. Maybe it had been happening since the moment the Reverend stumbled upon this spot in the woods, driven here by the voice of God. What if he’d followed the wrong voice? Sacrilege to think it, his dad would say. Well, maybe his dad was dead wrong, too.
Had all the adults been wrong? Was building Little Heaven their biggest mistake? Even the strongest adults could be misguided—guys like Mr. Fairweather and Mr. Langtree, who Nate was pretty sure were both dead. Dead: before tonight he had never felt the coffin nail finality of that word. He had lost two goldfish and a hamster, Mr. Pips. That was his only experience with death. His mother had flushed the fish down the toilet—a burial at sea, she called it. Mr. Pips got buried in a shoe box in the backyard of a house they had been renting outside Portsmouth. Nate felt bad at losing them, but their deaths had been quick—he woke up to find the fish floating in their bowl before his mom scooped them out with a little skimmer; Mr. Pips died over the weekend when he was away at his dad’s place, so Nate only saw him inside the box, which his mom had padded with cotton batting. They hadn’t screamed like the men had earlier tonight. He had never heard the fear or the wretched bewilderment that their screams had held, either—fish and hamsters just went glub-glub or squeak-squeak, and then, Nate guessed, they died. So it was different. Humans died in worse ways, or at least Mr. Fairweather and Mr. Langtree and Mr. Redhill had.
Nate wondered, if those men could walk it all back—the decision to join Reverend Flesher’s congregation and come here to Little Heaven—would they do it? But it was too late. You can’t relive your life. You couldn’t hop into H. G. Wells’s time machine and zap back to the site of your bad decisions and make a better one. If the decisions you made were stupid ones, well, it wasn’t just you who suffered. No fact seemed clearer to Nate than this: adults were as often wrong as right. And what choice did their kids have but to follow along? Wasn’t that your job as a kid—to tag along and not make noise? And a kid has to believe that those added years should equal added wisdom, right? H-E-double-hockey-sticks no! Adults could be stupid when it came down to it. When the rubber hit the road, as his mom would say—his mother, who had been stupid herself, getting locked up in jail when Nate needed her most. He hated being mad at her, and angry at his father for his weakness… but his parents’ mistakes had led him here.
It dawned for the first time how difficult and perhaps how fearful it was to be an adult. And Nate was suddenly and selfishly afraid not only for himself now but also for what it seemed he might become.