MicroHorror

The two physicists were astounded at the blue rock’s properties. Drs. Dixon and Henry bombarded it with electrons in a vacuum-sealed room, and it gave off barrages of energy without any loss of mass. They increased the electron stream, and the rock became surrounded by a cloud. It still hasn’t lost any mass, but now it had somehow created half a pound’s worth of water vapor and nitrogen. This was extremely exciting, certainly worth accepting the research grant from the dullest city in Sweden. Drs. Dixon and Henry began bombarding it on a regular basis. Every time it maintained its exact weight, down to the milligram, but several pounds of air were materializing around it, sometimes with leaves. Once a whole shrub appeared in the chamber. Was this teleportation? If so, from where? Drs. Dixon and Henry looked all around their facility, but there wasn’t any evidence of an uprooted shrub. So they amped up the electrons to its highest level, determined to figure where their matter was coming from. The room filled with smoke, and there was a garbled scream. Drs. Dixon and Henry made sure neither of them were trapped in the room, then threw open to the door to see who had materialized. It was an old man missing half his head, cut cleanly at the lower lip, brain and blood spilling on the freshly charred tile floor. The dead man was wearing a dirty waistcoat and leggings that looked like Napoleonic garb. Drs. Dixon and Henry hadn’t been figuring when their matter was coming from. 

I can’t die. Believe me, I’ve tried. I stepped off a roof, jumped in front of a car, and all I got out of it was a broken leg, which miraculously healed in just thirty-six hours. The doctors convinced themselves that the X-rays got switched, completely overlooking the fact that it would mean that some other poor guy was walking around out there with a shattered left leg. I guess the closest I got was when I stepped into one of those big wood chippers. Damn, that hurt.

Why am I so set on dying? I don’t know. At first it was everything in my life, but then it sort of became a challenge. What made me want to end it all in the first place was a variety of things. Boredom, mostly. Depression. Maybe general teen angst. It doesn’t help that my parents are raving lunatics. Trust me, any embarrassing thing your parents have ever done to you I can top, ten-fold. Oh yeah, and my girlfriend dumped me. Whore.

In my quest to snuff out my meaningless existence I would have to overcome my apparent ability to come back from any injury I could imagine. It occurred to me that I still do get injured. I get injured, maybe even die, but I always come back. But it’s always after the activity that injuries me is over with. I wouldn’t be able to come back if it was a continuing process. I wouldn’t be able to regenerate, or whatever it is, if it was still going on.

I thought of freezing myself, that would surely do it, but the logistics were hard to work out and I was afraid that eventually something would happen to thaw me out. I considered chaining myself to concrete blocks and tossing them into the water, but I’ve seen all those movies where the campers stumble across the guy at the bottom of the lake and he comes to life and hacks them all to death. It never stops him, why would it stop me? And I don’t want to hack anyone up except myself. I needed something more permanent than that, more definite, something that wouldn’t leave me wondering if someone would one day thaw me out or pull me from the water.

Concrete. I could lower myself into wet concrete. At first I would drown, feeling the pain and burning as my body fought for air, my lungs sucking in the wet cement. Then the concrete would harden and I’d be trapped forever. A perfect plan.

Perfect. Was I ever wrong! I awoke to that pain of my lungs trying to fill, to the pressure of all that weight pressing upon me. I hadn’t considered this possibility. Now I just want out. I want to live the sixty or eighty years I was supposed to live and die of old age. I don’t want to be here, alone in this dark with my muscles and joints aching because I haven’t moved them for days.

Maybe I will still die of old age. What will it be like to be trapped in here for eighty years, all alone with only my thoughts to keep me company? I guess I’ve really screwed myself this time. Is this what hell is like? What if I don’t die soon? What if I do die of old age? Oh, God, what if I don’t?

Michael wrestled the door shut and leaned against it, panting. The bloodstained sledgehammer hung heavy in his hand. He shifted the barricade back into position and tried to ignore the groaning and pounding and shuffling of the walking corpses outside.

“Emily?” he called. ”I didn’t mean to be gone so long, honey. I had to go a bit further this time.”

He reached into his rucksack and began stacking the cans of food on the counter. Startled by the sound of the sharp, wracking cough, he whirled round. Emily swayed unsteadily behind him, her eyes wide with fear. Flecks of aerated blood lined her blue-tinged lips. Michael’s hand tightened on the hammer’s handle as a single bloody tear ran down her face.

Emily closed her eye and focused on the colored target across the field. She stood strong and held her breath for concentration. Her bow was a lot more technical that the ones she had seen on television. It was made of wood with a camouflage-patterned handle. Its arrows were made of metal, perfect for slaying dragons. One arrow to the heart and the dragon would drop dead. No longer could princesses rely on knights in shining armor to rescue them. This princess had to rescue herself. Mother would be out at work when she returned to the castle and she would be alone with the dragon, which would play its secret games with her, touch her, smell her, breathe on her with stinking breath until Mother came back. The dragon held them prisoner.

She would lie awake at night (telling herself it was because there was a pea under the mattress) and listen to the roaring downstairs. Mother would cry as plates smashed on walls. The dragon would thud upstairs to its lair, leaving her to tidy its mess before tearfully retiring up to the dungeon. She opened her hand and let the arrow fly. It hit the yellow center and she let out her breath.

The instructor rested his warm hand on her shoulder. “Excellent work, Emily. You’re a natural.”

She looked up and returned the smile.

As she stepped silently through the front door she could hear the dragon stirring in the living room. It had lain in waiting all afternoon, drinking, ready to strike when she returned to the castle. She slipped off her shoes, lifted up her bow and slotted an arrow into place. She tiptoed through, holding her breath, and took aim.

I swam through the black goop, only a small pinhole allowing light into the cavernous room. I had awoken here, floating, and I couldn’t see too far ahead of me or behind, or too far through the murk in general. The small amount of light that was there was insufficient for any sensory analysis.

I definitely couldn’t see any way out, and there was no way I could possibly get through the light hole. I eventually found a tiny bit of a ledge outside of the goop and slipped up on to it, covered in the stuff. By the looks of it, it should have smelled like tar, but it was closer to the smell of rotting trash mixed with cooking cabbage. I clawed around me, trying to find a higher ledge to slip up on to to see how high in the thing I could get. I also didn’t know how clear my vision would get.

My eyes eventually adjusted, but it was still somewhat difficult to see, and there was definitely no way out of this place. Even though there was no hope of making it through the tiny pinhole, I made my way towards it, knowing that it was my only source of oxygen in this place. The black stuff clung to me no matter how high I went, but it wasn’t that heavy, and oddly enough it wasn’t too slippery as I climbed fine with it on my hands.

I got to the top of the room, hanging almost horizontally on the domed ceiling, and with more than several sighs of relief, I realized the hole was large enough for me to get my arm through. I thought that maybe I could get lucky and the ground or something to stand on was above it, and that the material this pseudo-rock was made out of was flimsy enough to break down with my hand.

I was wrong. I pulled as hard as I could, but the material wouldn’t budge. I let out a hopeless whimper, at that time believing I had nothing I could do to make it out. So I stayed there, clinging to the ceiling with both hands and feet, the black goop moving over and around me and soaking in to my clothes, keeping me cold in the darkness.

After several days of hanging there without sleep, food, or drink, I started to become more than desperate. I realized that if I didn’t do something drastic, I would definitely die, and any hope I had of survival would be destroyed. In a blind, desperate, self-loathing rage I slipped my right arm through the hole in the ceiling, bending my elbow so I was holding myself up with my forearm on the rocky surface. I pulled as hard as I could, hearing my bones crack and my skin tear as I desperately tried to rip my arm off in order to pull down some of the land that kept me locked there. My arm finally broke off and I fell down, the force of my weight pulling me down but the strength I had mustered in my desperate state kept me clinging to the ceiling.

I hung there for a few more days, but by that time I didn’t have any idea of morning or night, days, weeks, or even minutes. I decided that there must be a way out further down that I just hadn’t explored yet, and let go of the ceiling, dropping back in to the black goop.

I fell through it without a splash, being sucked down deeper in to it no matter how much I struggled to gain control and tread it. I felt myself exit the goop and suddenly stop in place.

I felt myself expand to encompass the entire universe, the very particles of my physical being split apart and wafting in all directions. My vision expanded, before being blinked out in to infinite silence. I couldn’t even take a breath.

Srinivasan was at the village well one night when he was bitten on the left ankle by a snake. It wasn’t a snake he had seen before, and he thought he had seen all the snakes. The wound swelled. Srinivasan hobbled back to his hut, and had his uncle look at the bite. Uncle sucked on the bite and spat out anything that might have been inside, and said to go to the doctor to get the snakebite medicine. That was a large needle in the rump, which did not make his ankle feel better but made his rump feel worse. The ankle reduced swelling, and in a week it was back to normal. Srinivasan was relieved the wound was not fatal. But it did have lasting effects. Four weeks after his bite, the wound began to be irritated. It turned itchy, and greenish, and Srinivasan worried it was gangrenous. But it was worse. Srinivasan’s left leg began to pull into his torso, as if it were a turtle’s leg. The right leg did so, too, as did his arms. Srinivasan was changing, becoming some malformed stump. But his neck felt longer, and the feeling wasn’t horrible but invigorating. His clothes began falling away from him, and he crawled, slithered more aptly, out of them and out his hut’s door. The last conscious thought Srinivasan had before a night of mindless killing was that he thought this sort of thing only happened with wolf bites.

A blue light came from the forest outside Uddevalla at night, Ristu swore. The spot would spin your compass, make you feel hot and then cold, and kill you if you stood in it too long. No one had seen it but old Ristu, and Ristu was a drunk even by Scandinavian standards. But Lars was stuck in Uddevalla for another week until his ship launched, so he had some time to kill, so he asked Ristu to show him. Ristu staggered through the woods, seemingly going in circles, Lars following along with the lantern. Ristu stank of vodka, but herring fishing taught Lars how to breathe through his mouth if nothing else. After two hours they came to a burnt spot in the woods. Lars took out a compass, and sure enough it was spinning wildly. Lars was amazed there was any truth to this phenomenon. Ristu jumped up and down on the ash, saying the spot was getting hotter. It felt colder to Lars. A blue light appeared from a spot three feet above the ground, like a candle flame without a candle. It grew immediately, enveloping Ristu’s body to the waist. It then flashed hard, knocking Lars on his back. Lars picked himself up and ran back to the sizzling spot. The top half of Ristu’s head was lying on its side, cut cleanly at the upper lip, brain and blood spilling on the freshly charred soil. Lars had no idea where the rest of Ristu was, but it wasn’t here. 

She watched them trudging across the empty lot, climbing over the old wooden fence into the small plot of pasture land on the edge of town. Most years, it had held cattle until well into the fall, but the past few years it had lain fallow. Next year, it would be developed, with a cul-de-sac and a bunch of new homes. She knew that she would miss the picturesque view over her back fence, once it simply looked out onto somebody else’s back yard… but her loss would be nothing compared to that of the children.

For them, the pasture was a playtime paradise, a fantasy kingdom with stands of trees to serve as elven forests and bushes to be fairy circles, concrete feeding troughs for pagan altars and monoliths, huge woodpiles to serve as sleeping giants or evil strongholds, and drainage ditches that could be roaring rivers or troll tunnels. It was really only a few acres, but it could be as big as a child’s imagination.

She envied them, they with a whole afternoon of adventuring ahead of them while she was stuck with the housework and the gardening. Well, the gardening she didn’t mind so much… but she envied those who could be so young and free as to take a plot of empty, supposedly worthless land and turn it into a world of excitement and wonder.

“Hi, Mrs. Letheridge!” the middle child, the girl Jessie, called out to her, seeing her watching them.

“Hi, yourselves!” she called out. “So, where are you lot off to today? Fighting the goblins again?”

“Adam found a dragon,” Jessie said.

“You going to slay it, then?” she asked them, smiling.

“No, it’s only a baby,” Adam, the youngest of the three, said. “I asked mom if I could take some food for it, but she only gave us these apples. I don’t know if dragons like apples.”

“I expect you’d prefer to feed it some chocolate bars,” she said with a wink.

“I think the dragon would like that a lot,” Billy said.

“I don’t know if dragons like…” Adam began, but he hushed up at a look from his sister.

“I’ll just go and get you some, then,” she said. She hurried inside and got some from the bowl she kept in the kitchen, then returned to the children by the fence. “Now, you be sure to let me know how the dragon likes these… and, well, no need to tell your mother, is there?”

She watched them stomping happily through the tall grass towards the trees on the hill, then remembered that she had a load of laundry in that was probably about done. After she’d transferred it to the dryer and started the next load, she sat down to grab a few minutes resting and catch up on a bit of her reading before she headed back into the yard.

As soon as she did, she spied Adam’s sandy-haired head bobbing its way across the pasture land. She immediately felt that there was something badly wrong, and not just because the youngest child was on his own. As he came closer, she could tell that he was limping badly… though moving faster than he had on his way.

“Adam!” she cried. He jumped, but then turned slightly and made a beeline towards her.

“Are you hurt?” she asked as he drew close. “Where’s Billy and Jessie?”

He just looked at her. He looked like he was going to cry, but couldn’t. He had bloody scratches on his face and hands.

“What happened?” she asked him, picturing the children lying at the bottom of a ditch with broken bones, or trapped under a wood pile that shifted when they tried to climb it.

“Dragons… really don’t like apples and chocolate bars,” he said.

Darkness pooled through the small windows and spilled across the dusty basement, knitting a complex tapestry of shadow that crawled across the cold cement walls.

Richard Lang swallowed hard, feeling the sweat slide down his forehead. His wrists were fastened with cold steel handcuffs, and several layers of duct tape bound his legs. No matter how hard he tried, he could not free himself from the cruel restraints.

How did he end up here in the first place?

Richard tried to calm himself and focus, but the darkness was too overpowering. He had been sitting inside this dusty little basement for about three hours now. But he was not alone. He could feel something watching him from the shadows, studying him like a laboratory specimen.

Richard grimaced. The handcuffs bit into his flesh and drew a river of blood from his wrist. Thick crimson fluid seeped down his fingers and created a pool on the filthy cement floor. He could hear voices emanate from the darkness.

“What the hell is going on here?” he demanded.

The voices dissipated suddenly.

“Who are you people, and why are you keeping me here?”

Richard waited.

“I know my rights. You can’t keep me here without my consent. I demand to know why I’m here.”

The basement became still as a tomb. Richard glared through the rippling darkness. He could have sworn that he heard a childlike giggle waft from the paranormal night.

“Answer my questions, dammit!”

Despite his commanding words, Richard’s voice quivered with fear. He could definitely feel a strange presence inside the room. The only thing that terrified him more than the darkness was the beings that infested the darkness.

“Do you really want to know why you’re here, Mr. Lang?”

The voice was high and nasal.

Richard felt his hair stand on end. Something about the voice was wrong… not human. He could see vague forms scuttling about in the darkness, jumping here and there with unearthly speed.

A dim sixty-watt light bulb flickered on the ceiling, revealing an odd-looking metal machine. Two large prongs protruded from the front, and countless wires fastened into the mechanical beast. It looked like some bizarre prototype Flash Gordon ray gun.

“What the hell is that thing?”

“It’s an advanced physiological transmutation device.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Richard struggled to break free. The duct tape constricted blood flow to his feet, and made it feel like a thousand pins were jabbing into his toes. He resisted the urge to scream for help.

“That means we will make you into one of us.”

Richard peered into the frothy shadows. The soft light fell across his sinister counterpart, and Richard gasped. His heart skipped a beat. The thing that stepped out of the darkness was not human at all.

It was a giant rat.

Richard screamed and wrestled desperately to escape, but the bonds were too tight. His eyes flashed with horror as the giant creature stepped toward him, walking on its hind legs and donning a neat Italian suit.

“Let me out of this madhouse!” Richard cried.

“Now, don’t worry,” the rat urged. “This will all be over soon.”

The machine started to hum, and a glistening blue plasma coil shot from the metal prongs. Richard’s shriek of horror died in his throat as the burst of electricity enveloped his body. He could feel his internal organs burst into mush, and then everything was over.

When Richard awoke two hours later, his head ached and the room was bathed in darkness. Every nerve in his body burned like fire, from his head down to his toes. He felt like hell.

He reached down to massage his sore wrists. Except he no longer possessed two human hands. His palms were covered with coarse gray hair, and jagged claws extended from his fingertips.

Something was definitely not right.

A metal bolt floated away during the space walk yesterday. This was an acceptable casualty. The work could be completed without that particular bolt, and the risk to retrieve the parts outweighed their value. The day before, a washer floated away. The enormity of space, even around the thin sliver where shuttles orbit, meant the bolt and washer would probably float in space for a few years before getting vaporized on reentry. But the bolt’s random momentum put it in a direct path with the washer. It floated perfectly through the washer’s hole, adapted a new joint momentum, and went off in a direction neither the bolt nor washer was traveling before. By growing coincidence, this bolt/washer would soon meet with an access panel that slipped from a cosmonaut’s gloved fingers 18 years before. It would thread through a bolt hole in a corner, and the combined momentum would put it in the path of a steel beam that escaped from Skylab. Piece by piece, an improbable machine is being built in the vacuum of space. It grows with each human visit above the atmosphere. Bare copper wires hang off the side of this assembled contraption, awaiting a battery or solar panel to drift its way, and spark this spaceborne machine to life.