MicroHorror

I heard the howling night after night, waking me up and coming closer and closer to my secluded country cottage. Peeking out my bedroom window, I caught a glimpse of a huge moonlit shadow sprinting in the field about fifty feet away. I’d heard rumors from locals that a werewolf roamed the surrounding forest, but I scoffed at the folk superstition and wondered how they could be so gullible and backward. Or if they were toying with me, the strange-looking outsider. I say strange-looking because I’m unusually tall, six feet eleven inches, and since my wife died, murdered by a vampire, I’ve always dressed in black. I also wear black because in my line of work, Vampire Slaying, I need all the deception and cover I can get; the night is a good friend when you are hard to see and something hellish wants to sink fangs into your jugular vein.

You might wonder why I, a Vampire Slayer, disbelieved in werewolves. The answer is in my ten years of slaying vampires, I’d never seen a bona fide werewolf. Usually people either confused a large dog with a werewolf or some attention seeker concocted a story. However, I will confess that night the howls and the shadow made me reevaluate my opinion. As I’m a man who believes in being prepared for the worst case scenarios, I equipped myself with deterrents, just in case.

On an eerie night when the moon was bloated, the howling began again, waking me up. Louder, scarier, and closer than I’d heard the howls before, I knew things were about to get intense. I was right. The werewolf, standing eight feet tall, smashed down my door with a single crushing blow. Fangs like daggers, eyes hell-red, he glared at me, snarling. Though I’d seen some scary things hunting the undead, I’d never seen anything as frightening as that werewolf who smelled like rotting flesh.

The werewolf leaped at me. My fears shifted into survival mode. I drew a six-shooter out of a holster beneath my long black coat. I pumped six silver bullets into him, each one knocking him backward. By the sixth shot, he laughed, his body shaking with disdain. “Don’t believe everything you see in the movies,” he said. “The silver bullet thing is a myth.”

“How about this?” I said, brandishing a blowtorch and turning it on. The white-hot flame roared and crispy-fried him. He howled in pain, turned charcoal black, staggered, and dropped to the floor dead, his body crackling and smoking.

Relieved, I sat down in my leopard skin-covered recliner, grabbed my remote, and turned on Oprah for some much needed R&R. Ironically, an author was promoting his Oprah Book Club Recommended Book about wolves.

Engrossed in the show, I almost missed a stirring on the floor. I looked over to where I’d slain the werewolf. Just like in the horror movies, his remains slowly reassembled. Shocked, I watch in disbelief.

“Nice try,” he said, and shuffled toward me fully reanimated.

“Okay,” I said, reaching for a thirteenth-century holy water-blessed longsword, alleged to be used by Richard of Cromwell during the Crusades. The werewolf lunged at me, meeting my swing in midair. His head, seamlessly dispatched, sailed through the room, bounced off a wall, and rolled into a corner, his headless body quivering on the floor like Jell-o.

I waited to see if I needed more measures to dispatch the werewolf to whatever hell he was sent from. When he was irrevocably dead, I chopped up his remains to make it easier to carry his body. I put his sliced and diced body parts in burlap bags doused in holy water. I placed priest-blessed crucifixes in each bag, and dumped the bags in a hole I’d dug in my backyard. I returned to my cottage and for the first time in weeks slept an entire night without the damnable howling.

 ”Wow!” he said, the first time he saw her at the Fordham City Singles Club in a skin-tight blue halter dress that displayed more curves than the Indy 500.

“Wow, yourself,” she said, with a wicked smile and a devilish wink. He laughed and winked back at her, amazed at his luck, stunned by her crystal blue eyes and golden blond hair. They spent the next six hours discovering they had everything in common. He saw her the next day and every day after that. Two months later they married.

Back home after the honeymoon as they prepared for bed, she cooed, “Just a minute, honey,” and pitter-pattered downstairs in a sexy Victoria’s Secret sheer black nightgown.

“Don’t be la-la-long,” he said, yawning, fighting the sleep that drugged his mind like a sleeping pill before he dozed off.

“Here I come, sweetie,” she said, tiptoeing up the stairs with a long-handled axe she was about to carve a seventh notch in.

At night it sits at the end of my bed and looks at me as I sleep. Its teeth are like sharpened porcelain toothpicks, and they click periodically as I lie in bed. At first it was difficult to even close my eyelids, its ebony orbs reflecting the image of the room and refusing to give me even the momentary peace of blinking. Eventually I began passing out at work from the exhaustion. I was sent to the doctor to get some pills. It clacked its teeth when the doctor wrote the prescription, as if trying to imitate a laugh. I never seriously considered telling the doctor that there was an emaciated, deformed thing behind him, pretending to be human. He wouldn’t have seen it no matter how long I pointed.

I never got the prescription filled. Instead, I tried to photograph the thing. It smiled for the camera. Then it grabbed the camera, crushed it, and emitted such a high-pitched sound that I collapsed, clutching my ears. I spent the rest of the day in a closet, its clicking teeth the only sound reaching me inside.

Last night it talked to me during my sleep. I awoke to what sounded like a low rumbling, followed by a loud whine. Whatever language it spoke, I could not reproduce with even a hundred years of training, but it created in me a fear that I had never imagined possible, a fear deep within me that elicited images of a world unbounded by physical laws, a world of primordial chaos. It gripped my head with its hands and forced me to listen, the clicking of its teeth growing ever more rapid and distinct. I have no idea how long it held me there, only that at some point the sun rose and that eventually I screamed. Then it let go and I bolted out of bed still screaming, yelling incoherent words in between each breath. I ran outside and as I did I felt it and heard its incessant clicking as it ran otherwise silently behind me. I collapsed in the street begging the pedestrians around me for help. No one can hear me screaming, I realized, just as those pristine needle-like teeth punched through my skull and scattered the rest of my thoughts.