MicroHorror

Kris twiddled the screwdriver, tongue peeping out of cherry-red lips. The bulb squeaked into place, and he gave it a gentle flick. It shuddered into life, reflecting back against black eyes. Wiring the bulb had been difficult, but it was worth it–a brilliant red glow lit up Rudolph’s glazed eyes. Satisfied, Kris patted the dog’s head, dropping him to his knees. He fell over and lay still as Kris straightened, groaning over a pot belly. “Time to cut down on the cookies,” he rumbled, chuckling. Rudolph, lying prone in a sticky black pool, didn’t respond. Shrugging, Kris turned to the next task.

“Well, look at you, Prancer,” he shouted, startling his pet. Prancer shivered and shrank back as Kris crossed the room. “You’re uneven!” Kris scooped up a nail gun as he passed the workbench. He held a crown of deer antlers steady, and shot a single nail down through the top. Prancer yelped once then collapsed. “Now you’re ready. We mustn’t disappoint the kiddies.” Ignoring the sticky black that slowly spread around Prancer’s head, Kris swung around to face the pen on the other side of the room. Sixteen dogs cowered behind chicken wire, whining and howling. Kris picked up a soldering gun and more antlers. He smiled brightly at the dogs, green eyes alight. “Now… who else wants to guide my sleigh tonight?” 

It was common practice to wait until rain before lighting scrap wood on fire. Raymond Ruthers had been doing it for 72 years, and hadn’t sparked up the countryside yet. His new neighbor Todd was from Indianapolis, so he didn’t have that sort of common sense in the blood. Todd had bought the farmhouse next door for the architecture, not the land. So Raymond told Todd about the rain trick, and Todd was appreciative. Those first couple burns of his were full of construction debris–Todd was putting in a darkroom of some sort, which he never asked Raymond to see and so Raymond never asked about. Whenever Raymond’s knee said it was going to rain, he would walk over to Todd’s house and tell him now was a good time for a burn, and Todd would always round up a huge pile of dead branches and detritus. Then Todd would disappear, drive off to who knows where. Raymond would go to sleep, and wake up in the middle of the night with Todd’s intense fire lighting up his bedroom. There were chemicals in there, photography stuff maybe, burning blue and green. Raymond couldn’t get within 30 feet of those burns–it was upwards of a thousand degrees. Raymond wasn’t going to tattle on his neighbor; he had some spilled solvents in his barn he wouldn’t want anyone poking round, either. When Raymond’s knee told of the next fire, he asked if he could throw in the bones of a deer he had recently butchered. Todd was fine with it, so the bones went in the wood pile. Again, it was lit in the middle of the night. The next morning, Raymond sifted through the smoldering ash, to find some remains. He couldn’t find a single trace from 30 pounds of bone. This was a very good way to dispose of a carcass. Raymond felt a ripple of fear running up his backbone. Todd knew this, too, and only drove to town when Raymond said it was safe to have a burn. 

In the blink of an eye, fate can change your whole world, affecting your stability and mental capacity. An idle mind is the devil’s playground. Don’t let your mind wonder. Keep it focused and in tone. While you are sitting back relaxing, your idle mind is still running hard, coming up with scenarios and consequences. Your thoughts and fears begin to grow. Have you ever sat back in a nice quiet room, no one else in the house, and started recalling crime stories from TV? Just really let your mind start to wonder and see how far it will go. Will every creak and sound be more noticeable? I’ve heard stories of people dropping babies in commodes or placing them in a trash bag and throwing them out on the roadside. When you see a trash bag in the middle of the road and run over it, do you think what could have been in there? Did some crazy person throw their baby in the street and you just ran over it? Do you go back and see what was in the bag or do you keep driving in hopes that no one could be so uncaring as to do something so terrible? You hear of crazy things that people do every day. You could’ve just become a murderer, accidental of course, but the same. You need to be careful of some fears. The more you feed into them, the more alluring they get. Wondering if you are really afraid, wondering if it would really be that bad, wanting you to get pulled into it to try it, thinking, would you would survive if you swerved in front of that truck or if it came at you? Don’t tread too heavy there. Some people say you worry too much. Do you really, or do you just open your mind enough to realize and know what this world is capable of? All right, so you do live your life in fear, but do you really know what all you have and haven’t done, or are you too scared to open the door? You start losing all emotions for common things. So why have fear when there is nothing to lose or gain? Somewhere in society we’ve gone astray, where you’re more worried about other people’s sick minds, and it’s polluting your own judgment. Some people say exposing your fear is a way of overcoming your fear. There is no overcoming fears. No escaping fears, only displacing them to other areas to release tensions. Grasping whatever helps to get through the initial fear. So the next time you come late at night and go to bed, you might want to walk around and make sure that your family is okay, because how do you know what had occurred, the lights are already off… well, good night, and hope you find your family alive in the morning.

The devil could read every thought on the planet at once, but he gave a particular focus to Gregori Ivanov. He ran a newspaper kiosk in Tbilisi, an unheated one. The winds would whip through his kiosk, disturbing the newspapers. “Stop, you pest,” he muttered to the wind in Georgian. When it rained, he took the papers inside the narrow booth so they’d stay dry, but people would assume he didn’t have newspapers and would walk by without giving him any money. “You’re worse than a month-long hangover,” he muttered. Whenever it wasn’t raining, the papers would go outside, weighed down by rocks, but in this wind even those rocks were threatening to be overturned. He was freezing to death in the dark kiosk, and his papers were going to be littering half the city. “God,” he muttered with the devil watching on the edge of ecstasy, “I’d sell my soul if this wind would stop.” The devil screamed with pleasure. The wind stopped. Gregori looked around, smiled a little bit, and continued on with his day. It would be 43 years before Gregori’s death, upon which he would get a big surprise.

The Greek island of Delos was pumice, the only rock that floats. It drifted across the Mediterranean, subject only to the currents. The island held 500 souls. The men fished the ever-changing variety that was found on its ever-changing shores, and never had to work more than the morning to feed their families. The wives were always with child, fed with fish. As their children grew taller, the island grew smaller. The weight of the growing population caused the island to sink, the waves to wash higher and higher on the Delos shore. The men told others on the island to sacrifice their children, but no father would do so with his own children. The island sank deeper into the Mediterranean until it found the seabed and halted. Delos would never move again. The fishing was not good, and the men had to work mornings and evenings just to survive. Years later, when the men were elders, the young asked them if the island really used to float. Yes, they said; Apollo in his wisdom tethered us to the ground. They could not remember when the island floated, but assumed it must have been a terrible life because it did not offer stability.