The Heavens Rise

“I have more of it, Ben. I went to the source and I took as much as I could ever need.”

“It looks like you took too much,” Ben whispered.

Noah lifted his scarred hand from the top of the cane. “Nice try,” he muttered. “But this is from something else altogether.”

Noah’s smile was wobbly. “You always hid behind your sarcasm, Ben. Always. When you weren’t hiding behind Anthem and Nikki. You’re still hiding behind him, by the way. Standing here, at the threshold of one of the greatest miracles ever to be visited upon mankind, wondering how that vulgar, self-obsessed drunk will fare by the time the night is over.”

“I haven’t heard anything that sounds like a miracle,” Ben whispered.

“Then you haven’t been listening!” Noah roared.

“Why didn’t you stop him yourself?” Ben fired back. “Why go to all this trouble and waste all this time?”

“So time spent on you is wasted?”

“Stop fucking around with me!”

“There is no shield against what Marshall Ferriot has. There is no antidote. And if he gets you in his sights and he gets close enough, there’s no running. I am going to give you what you need to stop him, Ben. But first it was my responsibility to tell you our story so you would know the risks. So you would know how this works.”

“You’ve told me nothing,” Ben said. “I’ve got one journal entry from eight years ago, and nothing about what came afterwards except for your word. Which I don’t believe, by the way.”

“How could you deny what I can do after every—”

“I’m denying your story. You were the only person she had left in the world. She wouldn’t have left you in Bangkok unless she had a damn good reason.”

Noah lowered his eyes as if he were disappointed, and this time, Ben felt the darkness come like an insect darting through the air behind him before coming in for a landing on the back of his neck.

•   •   •

He came to on his knees, just outside a weak halo of light thrown by a Coleman lantern sitting on the floorboards a few feet away. There was pitch black all around him, but he could sense that he’d been moved— driven—inside some kind of barn or large storage shed. But it was the photographs spread out in a semicircle before him that captivated him.

At least twenty images in all, but they were of the same three monstrous creatures. One of them had to be the thing Millie Delongpre had been turned into. Just as Nikki had written in her journal, the contrast between the creature’s scaled face and the huge, staring, death-glazed human eyes stopped Ben’s breath in his throat, forced him back onto his haunches.

The others were worse.

All of them had been photographed in death; there was a giant hybrid of a man and what had to be a pit bull that had an almost serene expression, save for its gaping jaws, so huge and so stuffed with giant, almost cartoonish canine teeth, they looked poised to divide the entire creature’s head in half. The most human-looking creature of the three was an enormous woman—the combat rifle leaning against the concrete wall next to her gave her scale; Ben figured she was at least ten feet tall—with a giant ridge dividing her head and her twin flaps of greasy, knotted black curls. The flesh of her crossed legs was sealed together as if by hot wax. If she had been mobile, she would have been forced to drag herself around by her arms. Her dangling, teardrop-shaped breasts were striated by spiderwebs of dark blue veins and a lewd, serpentine tongue dangled from her leering clown’s grin of a mouth, so big that the entire thing could never have fit between her lips no matter how hard she had tried.

Ten feet tall . . . Mother of God.

And what was she? The nightmare version of some test subject’s mother or wife? What crosscurrents of the human mind had literally given flesh to such a horrid thing? Mind monsters, he thought. That’s what these things were. They were living nightmares, plucked from a person’s soul as the material of their soul was drawn from their flesh. No, they weren’t just plucked. That wasn’t the right word. Jostled. Let loose. Set free. A disturbance in the connection between Nikki and the subject that set these nightmares loose upon the world.

Mind monsters. The term came to him effortlessly. He even whispered it to himself. Then he remembered what Noah had said to him about trying to name and label everything. Clearly, the man had been speaking from his own experience because that was Ben’s exact urge. Name, label, categorize. Breathe.

Ben heard movement nearby, then the familiar metallic hum of electricity as several tracks of fluorescent light flickered to life in the rafters above. Noah was standing a few feet behind him at the entrance to what had once been a long boathouse. Walls had been built around the perimeter, and the rails where the boat slips had been rose up out of plywood coverings. On the wall behind Noah, Ben could make out a faded sign in brightly colored print, a series of warnings and notices to the parkgoers who had once lined up for swamp tours and boat rides from this now dark and dank space. The whole place had once been a zoo or an amusement park.

Noah’s stare seemed vacant, then Ben heard a swinging chain behind him, and he realized his captor was focused on something just over Ben’s shoulder.

Ben screamed when he saw it. Not a short, sharp cry, but a guttural scream triggered by a true belief that he was in immediate physical danger. But after a few minutes of stumbling backward, almost losing his balance a few times, and watching the creature swinging from chains above the floorboards, Ben realized that, even though it was twice his size, the creature swinging from chains strung from the ceiling was dead. A chain had been attached to each large, translucent wing, keeping them spread out behind the slender, malformed body at its center. The wings were patterned like those of a butterfly, but the colors themselves were the greens and browns of the deep swamp. And the body that appeared to be pinned to the very center of both wings was almost humanoid. Infantile, even. Bald, with foreshortened, dangling legs. Covered from head to tiny knotted toes in what looked to be charcoal-colored fur.

And Ben wondered if the reason he hadn’t lost his mind entirely was because there was always a part of him that believed the swamp could give birth to such vicious and massive creatures. And to behold one now, to smell the sour-milk stench it gave off, returned him to a state of childlike wonder. But childlike wonder is always accompanied by a child’s overpowering sense of helplessness, and so, for the first time in his life, he was fighting not to lose control of his bladder and his hands rested against the nape of his neck as if there was a strand of pearls there for him to clutch for dear life.

“You wanted the whole story,” Noah said. “Here’s the whole story.”

Ben heard Noah’s footsteps approaching from behind as he studied the dangling creature before him. And then he realized what was familiar about the creature’s blackened face; the deeply recessed brow, and the jutting lips, contorted into a cruel parody of a baby’s pout, even in death. They were cartoonish distortions of a face he’d seen just earlier that day—impossible to believe it had been the same day, but it had been—the email a woman named Allison Cross had sent him as he’d pulled away from his apartment building with Marissa and a tiny motorboat in tow.

Millie Delongpre. Yes. You see, she and my husband, they were together before she met Noah, and well, Jeffrey always carried a torch for her. He even talked to her in his sleep.

Her husband, missing. Her husband, one of the only other men to love Millie as much as Noah had. Her husband, here now before him, a shadow in the facial features of this terrible creature.

“Jeffrey Cross,” Ben said.

Noah went rigid beside him.

“Jeffrey Cross has been missing for weeks. His wife, she called me today and . . .” Ben pointed at the creature but he couldn’t find the right words. “This is . . . Is this . . . ?”

“It doesn’t sound like you need my help. You’re smarter now. When you were a kid, you were all emotion and temper and—”

“You were trying to reverse it,” Ben said. “Jeffrey’s wife told me he always carried a torch for Millie. He was there the night you proposed to her. So you re-created Elysium just as it had looked on that night. And you brought Jeffrey Cross here and . . . what?”

In response, Noah lifted his chin and stared directly at the creature.

“Jesus Christ,” Ben said. “Is this what Nikki found out? That you were actually going to make a