MicroHorror

It’s almost like this Wicca shit doesn’t even work. I’ve spent so much money on goddamned candles and incense and all other kind of whatnot. The worst was the dagger and silver plates, not cheap. Not to mention the cuts and other injuries sustained from sacrificing cats and shit. I just don’t undertand, I got all the instructions from one of those girls who dyes her hair black and listens to metal. I mean, she would know, right?

I hope so, because this is the third time I’ve been to her and she keeps giving me more and more things to do. Now, apparently, I need to stand north of the pentagram and the candles and turn around three times counter-clockwise and then dump the chicken blood on my head. She only tells me what I’m doing wrong afterwards. She’s not that great with directions. Sometimes I wonder if she’s leading me wrong on purpose. I don’t know why she would do that though. I apologized for calling her a witchy cunt at the prom in front of everyone.

So anyway, here we go. Candles: lit. Pentagram: drawn. Chicken: ungh, ungh, decapitated. Standing: north. Turn: three times to the left.

Okay, all done. Now I need to find my EPT to see if the damn ceremony worked this time. Getting unpregnant should not be this hard.

Fantasyland is a lost cause. They’ve got it surrounded with lots of guards and whatever is going on in there, whatever they’ve got planned, it’s probably too late for us to do anything about it. They’ve raised the drawbridge into the castle and they have the highest vantage point in the park. They’ve got the high ground and they can keep us under surveillance. We have to move at night and try to stay hidden. Whatever they’re planning in there, it’s probably not going to be good for us.

Our only plan is to try and use the underground tunnels to sneak into the castle and see what they’re up to. We’ve seen them using the character costumes as uniforms of a sort. We found a stash of them hidden in an area behind the Jungle Cruise. Mickeys are the leaders, followed by Goofys and Donalds. We stole the costumes and are going to attempt to get into the castle and see what’s going on in there, in Fantasyland.

The men we are fighting against are other survivors like ourselves; they simply had access to weapons and more people. When they first showed up we tried to make peace with them, we sent a group to talk to them. Those people we sent have never been back and it’s been a couple of days since then. They’ve killed anyone they’ve run across in the park during the day–when they’re not riding a ride, of course. We see them riding the Haunted Mansion over and over all day.  They love that one for some reason. We’ve managed to avoid capture by moving at night and staying hidden in the shops during the day. We’ve seen them moving large boxes up through Main Street and into the castle, great big heavy boxes that need four men to move them. Armed guards usually follow the boxes. Whatever they are up to in Fantasyland, it can’t be pretty and it can’t be good for us.

So our only choice is to sneak into the castle somehow and see if there is anything we can do about it. If not, then we will try to get out without being found out. We’re going in the morning. I’m a Mickey. My wife is a Goofy and her brother is a Donald. Let’s hope the Three Caballeros can do something about this.

This house had a beating heart. It pulsed and boomed. Shaking the floors and deafening the kids. No one else heard it or saw it, but they felt it. They could feel it when they opened the door. It made them walk to the side. Pause for a breath. Shake it off like they were going crazy. They don’t know what crazy is. A few steps and then the walls crack. The ceiling falls. Beams land and break bones. They look at me and wonder why I’m not upset or panicked. Why don’t I try to dodge the collapse? Why aren’t I being crushed? They hold out their hands for help. They plead for my intervention. It’s not gonna happen. The floor opens and they sink. The fall down the hole the house made for them. I’m not supposed to look down when they’re taken. It’s one of the rules. I don’t dare disobey.

Twenty-one hours had passed since we arrived at Valley View Hospital. Ophelia was in active labor. From my vantage point, I was able to see as soon as the baby’s head started to crown. I can’t even begin to describe that feeling. Finally, at age 36, to be a dad!

“Everything looks great!” said the doctor. “You’ll be holding a healthy little girl in just a few minutes.”

And then the antiseptic scent of the birthing room faded away, and I nearly gagged on the odor of spilled beer and stale cigarettes. A memory I had tucked away a long time ago came flooding back, so strong it was almost like living it again.

Before the wedding, before I even met Ophelia, back before mortgages and a master’s degree, four of us skipped a semester of college to see if we could make it as a band. Elephant Nightmares embarked on a January to June tour of run-down bars and cheap hotels. None of us had a clue how to go about getting discovered, and we weren’t even clearing enough to pay our rent. But we were young, on the road, and living our dreams. And we could tell the girls we met that we were musicians.

One night we were playing a gig on the wrong side of Chicago. Must’ve been about May because I was starting to see that this wasn’t likely to pan out for us, and the fun was wearing off in a hurry. We were grabbing some beers between sets when a clean-cut older man (who looked really out of place) pulled me aside and struck up a conversation with me. Said his name was Jim Gilroy and he was in the local music industry.

“I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think the whole band is going to make it, but you’ve got chops. If you want to come see me, I can set you up as one of our studio players, and we’ll see what develops from there. If you’re as good as I think you are, we’ll back you on a solo project in a year or two, or let you put your own band together.”

I was blown away. To a broke and road-weary twenty-year old, that sounded great.

“What’s the catch? Is this going to wind up costing me my eternal soul?”

He laughed. “No, nothing like that. Tell you what–I’ll settle for your firstborn.”

I smiled, and he handed me his business card, and then we shook hands. A month later I was singing backup and playing guitar for some other folks just starting their own careers. I did that for a year, and it was a great experience. I got listed on some recordings that did pretty well, met a lot of interesting people, and got to know the music scene in the Windy City. If I had stuck with it, maybe I could have made it to fame and glory. But my parents were pressuring me to finish college, and I wasn’t sure a musician’s life was really what I wanted after all. I remember the day I told Mr. Gilroy I was going back to school. He wished me well and said he hoped everything worked out for me. “It’s been good having you around, kid.”

As I was walking out the door he called out to me. “Hey, Kevin?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t forget that you still owe me your firstborn!” We laughed and I waved good-bye.

So strange. Fifteen damn years ago we had a little running joke, and now I was at the hospital about to meet my firstborn and that’s what I’m thinking of in the last moments of the delivery.

Ophelia gave final push and an enormous scream. Dr. Ortiz showed me where to cut the cord, and the nurse took the baby to the infant station across the room. I kept waiting to hear her cry.

“Shouldn’t she be crying, Doctor?”

“Doctor?”

But there was only silence.

His bedroom would have been better, but the bathroom had one thing his bedroom door lacked: a lock. Hell, he couldn’t even close the bedroom door without his mom getting on his frigging case. It was a little dangerous keeping the magazine in the back of the cabinet under the sink where she could find it if she ever bothered to look, but it would have been worse carrying it back and forth all the time.

He knew the pages by heart. He probably wouldn’t need to look at it at all, but he’d had it for so long it had become both relic and scripture to him. It was part of the ritual now. It flipped open to the center almost of its own accord, and there she was, waiting for him. He’d jerked himself off to every picture in the book, but only for a little variety. This was the one he kept coming back to. She was a goddess, an angel, a vision. She was everything that his life lacked. Just looking at her, he knew that she knew how to treat a man… and he was sure he knew how to treat a woman like her.

“Geoffrey!” his mother called, just as he was getting going.

Christ, what a mood killer. He ignored her, focused on the task at hand. Classy girl like this deserved his full attention, didn’t she?

“Geoffrey!”

“I’m in here, ma,” he yelled back.

“You’re in there again?” she asked, still just as loud even though she was right outside the door now.

“I’m just going to the bathroom.”

“Maybe you’re not getting enough fiber.”

What the hell was he supposed to say to that? He didn’t say anything. He focused on the girl in the picture, the angel, his angel. He was so close… so close… he wanted to slow down and take his time, really enjoy it, but fat chance of that. He would have given anything for his mother to just go away… or better, if he could go away. Far, far away… somewhere where he could get a little God-damned privacy… somewhere where people would understand that a growing boy… a man… has needs.

People like the one in the centerfold.

The angel.

His angel.

He was so close… almost there…

“I said, maybe you’re not getting enough fiber,” his mother repeated.

She didn’t get a reply.

“Geoffrey?” his mother yelled shrilly. “Geoffrey, you answer me!”

Silence, within and without.

“Geoffrey… open this door!”

…and then…

“Geoffrey!”

…and a bit later…

“Geoffrey?”

When she finally made up her mind and popped the lock, the bathroom was empty… or at least devoid of human life. The magazine lay on the floor, face down and open to the centerfold.

She reached for it tentatively, like she thought it was going to bite her. She couldn’t bring herself to pick it up; she only flipped it over.

Her blood ran cold.

And there we sat, in a kind of energetic silence which stretched like a meterstick in all directions. Inside that place, whatever it may be, a building, warehouse, giant tent, it didn’t really matter–we didn’t exactly perceive that we were in a place, after all. Everyone just shot black holes into space with dilated pupils.

A dirt floor, no chairs, most of us sat with our legs crossed in what I was always told was “Indian-style,” with the exception of a few who were sleeping on their sides, without pillows. We were completely without luxury and the room was dimly lit by the moonlight beaming in the fissure in the ceiling, or a rip in the fabric, who knew? Only the smell of night was there.

I’m not altogether sure how many of us there were in that giant circle. I remember you could see the other side clearly, but you couldn’t make out the faces of the people there. At the time, I was also confused as to why we were all sitting in a circle, as there was nothing in the middle of it. It was an almost religious experience, absent a monolith. (Does the omission of a theological alter imply a religious presence?) We all knew something was there; the ones who refused to accept the situation at hand tried to explain it away with strong magnetic forces, but something was definitely there, and perhaps its core was in the center and we gravitated around it without much thought. We just felt it was what we should do.

I was considering, as I’m sure all the others were, standing up and saying something. I didn’t know what I would say, if I would introduce myself in some way or not (it’s important to note that the concept of name didn’t matter to any of us at this point). I guess it would seem inappropriate as well to assign myself a number, as it would have to be “1″ for the first to speak, or the first to stand, or the first to do something. I thought at the time that it may imply a penchant for leadership, something I lacked.

So another man stood. “Uh… excuse me!” The correlation and timing of my thoughts were impeccable, and I felt as if all the others felt it, a natural movement in the collective unconscious.

“Yes, excuse me! What is all of this? Why are we sitting in a big circle? Are we inside of something?! Do we own this?! Does this own us?! Dirt!” He was obviously confused, and it became very clear to me why none of the others talked: we were afraid we might come out with something just as confused. I’m sure we would have. “Are we to eat this?!”

No one laughed; it wasn’t a joke. Without saying anything, I think we all started to consider what we would do for nourishment. We had children to think about as well. The thought of cannibalism was there, but we were afraid that might actually lessen our chances for survival, or whatever it was we were trying to do. We were also afraid to move and try to leave the place; we were worried about the lives of the braves who would dare the unknown.

Not that we knew anything. This wasn’t civilized; how could we understand? We just kept sitting.

When you’re tightly bound on a chair and the delicate scalpel slowly nears your eyeball, you’ll think for a second: No, he wouldn’t really, would he?

The gibing pain makes you scream so loud it shatters your fragile vocal chords, but you don’t notice. Or don’t care.

Because while you’re screaming in pain, and see the scalpel nearing again with your distorted one-eyed sight, you’ll only scream to pray the inevitable will pass over.

Which it won’t, because it’s inevitable after all.

Edward’s eyelids were peeled back, his retinas immediately stung harshly by a blinding, sickly yellow light. “He’s definitely infected,” came a far-off voice. “Looks like he’s had it about eight days, trying to hide it of course. Amazing he’s made it this long without showing any obvious symptoms. Well, let’s hurry and save what we can. The eyes, as usual, and I think Dr. Giovanni said he wanted some tongues to experiment on. Take the legs too, they can probably be saved.”

All this swirled into Edward’s subconsciousness, along with a relentless headache and a persistent delirium brought on by constant fever and the attempt to suppress it. He understood what was happening. He had Virus X. He had known for about a week now, that he had it for sure, and he also knew what happened to people with the virus. They were used for spare parts. There was no cure for Virus X. Sure, scientists were working on one, and had been for years. But this was too great a form of population control for any cures to actually surface.

Inbreeding, interbreeding, and all kinds of unhealthy patterns of mating had been going on for so long that, combined with radiation from numerous nuclear attacks and attempts to blot out the ultraviolet rays, it was almost impossible to find a human with all their limbs in correct and working order. Humans with one leg, three blind, milky eyes, and numerous nostrils oozing extra bodily fluids were not at all uncommon. So the more humans died of a mysterious disease, the better for the mutants, who wanted to be normal, although they would never quite think like everyone else. Of course, that was being worked on too.

* * *

Edward must have passed out again. Maybe for seconds, hours, weeks, he lay in a state of complete delirium. For some reason he kept slipping into an alternate reality inspired by a book he had once found in a deserted building. It was about an ancient world, living under a cold, dying, red sun. Only this was the opposite. The world was dying before its time, exposed to the harsh rays of the sun.

* * *

The next real, concrete sound Edward heard was the creaking of the cold, metal door being slowly opened. What Edward saw next, he was sure was a hallucination. A man in a white coat hobbled in, supported by one leg growing out of the center of his body. He walked using two prosthetic metal limbs, attached to his arms. They creaked in a rusty, tired way as he walked. That was not what took Edward aback. The most shocking thing about Dr. Giovanni was the fact that he had no real mouth or nose. Instead, there was just a gaping hole, ringed by a chapped, reddish-brown flap of skin. A hissing, gurgling noise came from it constantly, as if he were struggling to breathe.

A tall, gangly-looking female attendant followed the doctor into Edward’s room, looking around nervously as though she would any minute be infected by the Virus. “I’ve heard this one’s a goner,” Dr. Giovanni said in a mechanical voice, obviously coming from an implanted voice box. “Let’s operate.”

* * *

Before Edward knew what was happening, the doctor’s saw was digging into his leg.

It’s a slight, I do apologize. The young lady had made an indecent remark about my girlfriend the other day, but as they say, forgive and forget. I decided to be a decent chap and have her over for tea. Since we had studied hard all day and missed our bus, I figured, let us have tea at my place as she awaits her ride. It’s a really friendly place, my place, I thought, as we took the elevator.

“Cool elevator!” replied the young lady.

“Why, yes, yes it is,” I agreed offhandedly, taking off my gloves. I could’ve kept them on but I was home now.

“So, yeah, do you and your girlfriend live here? It’s a damn fancy place. Bet you have a big couch where you two screw the life out of each other!”

I smiled. “Our couch is rather small. Marianne finds it hard to lie down sometimes.” The elevator stopped. You think I would be aggrieved by her colorful statements, but I wasn’t. This was the way she was. I opened the door, turned on the light and watched her enter. “The phone is in the living room. Marianne should be in the kitchen.”

“Well, let’s say hello to Marianne then!” She did her beamy smile, her genuine smile, and danced into the kitchen. “So, Marianne, Mark here has been telling me about the little lovenest you two have here!” From behind I could delightfully see her mouth gasping. Stepping to her side, I noticed the wondrous lack of color to her cheeks. “What the hell is this?”

“Marianne!” I exclaimed, holding up my shovel. “We have a guest!” After hitting her several times with the shovel, I sat her in another chair and proceeded to make tea. Marianne admired my study partner’s wonderful complexion. Once my Earl Grey was ready, I sat in a chair myself. Sure my girlfriend and my guest were a quiet bunch, but that did not stop me from enjoying the glory of my place.

The boys hopped the fence, leaving their bikes hidden behind some mulberry bushes. Moments later the mist that blanketed the ground wrapped itself around the boys, just as it encased the weathered colonial-era headstones of the cemetery.

“What time is it, Tommy?” asked Ryan.

“It’s three minutes until midnight. We have to hurry,” said Tommy. Then Tommy gave Patrick a shove and said, “You scared, wuss?”

Patrick smiled and said, “You’ll see.” The truth was that even though Patrick was the smallest of the three boys he was the only one that wasn’t scared. If they succeeded in summoning the ghost he knew exactly what to do. His departed Irish grandmother had told him the secret.

The boys hurried to the center of the cemetery and quickly found the mausoleum that contained the family remains of Capt. Mathers.

“I have to hand it to you, Tommy. Picking an old slave-trader’s grave was pretty smart,” said Patrick.

“Yeah, if anyone’s soul is rotting in Hell it’s going to be his,” said Ryan.

Tommy smiled at their praise as he pulled out the parchment with the pentagram drawn on it. He also pulled out the razorblades, handing a blade to each of the other boys. As midnight made its arrival the boys sliced their fingers and smeared blood on the pentagram. Then they slid the bloody paper under the mausoleum door and began to chant, “Rise from the grave and serve us. Rise from the grave and serve us. Rise from the gra…”

T H U M P !

Something banged hard against the inside of the mausoleum door. Then the wailing began. It was an awful sound of despair and horror that physically hurt as it passed through the boys’ bodies, similar to a bitter wind tearing through lightweight clothing.

Tommy and Ryan turned and fled, but Patrick held his ground. Patrick knew what to do. His beloved grandmother had told him the secret.

The Ghost passed through the doors of the crypt and advanced upon Patrick, but still he did not run. When the ghost reached out and wrapped its ethereal fingers around Patrick’s throat it was too late to run. Patrick didn’t even have time to scream as he heard the sound of his soul being ripped from the confines of his body. When the deed was done the ghost tossed Patrick’s soul aside and began pursuing the other two boys. Patrick’s soul watched his lifeless body crumple to the darkened ground.

After the light appeared, and Patrick had walked through it, he was met on the other side by his grandmother.

“Mammo, I did what you said. I held my ground and didn’t run. You said if I held my ground and didn’t run that it couldn’t hurt me.”

In her lilting Irish brogue Patrick’s beloved grandmother said, “Oh, Padraig, you always were a wee bit daft. When visit’n me farm I told you to hold your ground, and not be afraid, if you were confronted by goats, G-O-A-T-S, goats.”