The thing in the rafters of the ruined, befouled chapel gibbered and giggled. Amos saw only a hint of its true shape. It was enough. It spoke to him in a familiar voice.
“You have been fiddling with your dirty stick, haven’t you?”
Amos was unsurprised to find he had an erection. It tented the satiny material of his pajamas. Idly, he reached under the waistband and began to pull on his cock. It felt nice to milk it like an itsy-bitsy udder.
“Yes,” he said stupidly.
“Fiddling and fiddling and fiddling…,” the thing crooned.
Amos pulled with greater force. He was going to make a mess. Back at the orphanage, he hated doing that; he would tease himself to the point of release, then grip it and squeeze so his seed wouldn’t spill out, so hard that blood vessels burst on the head of his penis. But he wasn’t worried about that now. He pulled on it real hard, just like the soft-brain Finn used to do to his own thick mongoloid dick. Amos yanked so forcefully that the skin ripped down the shaft, though it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, it felt wonderful. The air touched the ripped flesh with a pleasant tingle. He wasn’t thinking of anything remotely sexual; instead, he envisioned that his body had turned into an enormous mouth with teeth the size of bricks, snapping and chattering around inside the locked orphanage, chasing screaming kids and grinding them up, breaking their bones and pulping their soft flesh and cracking their skulls between his mammoth molars like walnuts and—
“What do you want?” he asked, feverishly.
“You know what,” Sister Muriel said.
And Amos did know. The Voice wanted what it had always wanted. What it had brought Amos out here for. The sweetest fruit of Little Heaven.
Amos began to laugh. It started out as effervescent titters but soon became throaty, then booming. It was not entirely sane, that laughter, but then, Little Heaven was no longer a sane place.
Amos wanted to obey the Voice. More than he’d ever wanted to follow the tenets of God. The Creator was a stodgy old bore. God stifled the true nature of man. The Voice spoke directly to that nature and asked that Amos do nothing more than give vent to the brutality that had long lurked at his core.
“Give it to me,” Sister Muriel—or the thing that was speaking in her voice—called down to him. “Give me what I want and I’ll give you what you need…”
But as Amos was a physical weakling and at heart a coward, he would have to be crafty. Well, crafty he could be. A plan was already flying together in his head, the pieces slotting flush.
“Yes.” His voice floated up into the poisoned chapel as Christ stared down impassively from His cross. “Yes.”
3
EBENEZER WAS UP AT DAWN, heading out of the mess hall and across the square. Micah called after him, but Eb didn’t bother to acknowledge his hail.
Eb stopped at a shed and grabbed a red toolbox. The box rattled against his thigh as he strode across the compound to the front gates. The sun was rising over the trees to lighten the woods. A few hollow-eyed Heavenites stood watch.
“Good morning, chappies,” he said to them. “Open up, daylight’s wasting.”
He was tired of these cornpone, Bible-bashing troglodyte shitbirds. They could go eat a bucket of elephant testicles, for all he cared. A big ole pailful, as these buffoons might say. Hyuk, hyuk. Crass, yes, but he had reached the end of his tether. If he was going to die, so be it. But not among these ingrate yokels, who would drag his soul into some hillbilly purgatory, where he’d be forced to listen to washboard-and-jug band jamborees for all eternity. Hell would be preferable.
When the morons didn’t move, Eb lifted the latch himself and pushed the gate open. He was whistling a Cockney tune. His hair had gone frizzy and was tangled up with shreds of dead leaves and maple keys—he would kill, quite literally kill, for a hot shower and a bottle of Lustre-Creme shampoo. Sunlight washed the access road, touching the body of Charlie Fairweather, who lay three hundred yards off. Well, half of Charlie, by the looks of it. Poor bastard.
Two motorbikes were parked past the gates. One was an old French Metisse with a 350cc two-stroke engine. The other was a newer Japanese model.
Micah caught up with him. His posture wasn’t threatening, only curious.
“What are you doing?”
“Leaving, good chum,” Eb said. “Hitting the lonesome trail, in your Yank parlance.”
He snapped open the toolbox, which he had stocked the day before for this very eventuality. He retrieved a can of two-in-one oil. He lubricated the chain and the suspension rig on the Metisse, straddled the seat, and bounced up and down to work the oil into the shock absorbers. Minerva hung back at the gates, watching him.
Micah said, “Think you will make it?”
“A bike is more nimble than that truck. It’s perfect for this terrain.”
“You think you’re gonna leave us with our asses hanging out, huh?” Minerva called over.
Ebenezer spoke to her over Micah’s shoulder. “I’m taking a sabbatical, milady. Much to your dismay, I can only guess. I promise to send a postcard.”
Minerva pulled Ellen’s pistol from her waistband, cocked it, and held it to her thigh. Ebenezer could only smile.
“Will you shoot me in the back?”
Minerva cocked her head as if to say, Try me. Ebenezer’s smile widened.
“Your aim is suspect, my dear. I’ll take my chances.”
He bent over the bike to check the timing gear. Someone shouted. “Hey! What the hell you think you’re doing?”
Ebenezer turned. Hooray, if it wasn’t Virgil, the more dunderheaded shitkicker of the Reverend’s gruesome twosome.
“Hey—black boy! That ain’t your property! You ain’t gonna—”
Virgil’s voice drilled into Ebenezer’s ears, unlocking an old memory. As a child, he and a friend had queued up for a showing of Crossfire starring Robert Mitchum at the Grenada Theatre. They had saved up all week. But when they reached the wicket, the ticket seller told them No Negroes allowed. He said it casually, almost apologetically—an existential apology for their bad luck to have been born black, a stain that would doom them the rest of their lives. So Ebenezer and his friend snuck in through the fire door and sat in the empty balcony section. But before the newsreel even finished, an usher found them. He clouted Eb on the ear with one fat fist. Sneaky little tar babies! he’d hissed, and chased them down the stairs. They ran out the emergency door closest to the movie screen. The sunlight hit Eb’s eyes, dazzling in its intensity; he turned to see the white people in the front row rearing back at the sudden light, their faces pale and marbly as cheese—they looked like terrified vampires at the moment Van Helsing let the sunlight into their coffins. Eb and his friend dashed down the alley to the street. The usher pursued for a block or two, but he was a porker and he faded fast, heaving on the cobbles, shaking an impotent fist.
Afterward, Eb sat on the curb outside the sweetshop, nursing his swollen ear. He had a powerful urge to go back and hurt that usher. In his young mind, he pictured a very sharp, long knife. He saw himself pinning the usher’s hand down by the wrist and cutting deep between the webbing of his fingers, halfway down his palm, so that when the flesh healed the man would be left with these tangly, freakish witch-fingers, long and spidery with almost no palm to speak of. But Ebenezer hadn’t owned a knife and lacked the will to steal one.