MicroHorror

A war was raging in the cemetery.

For decades it’d been a safe place to wait out the sunlight. Other undead walked amidst these gravestones beneath the moonlight, but we had long ago come to a kind of arrangement.

Only now all that was changing. My old allies had begun to fall, one by one, and no one knew who or what was killing them.

It had only been a matter of time before they came for me, but I would not abandon my home. I was too powerful, and too proud.

A figure approached me in the graveyard. He was making no attempt to hide, unaware my eyes could see quite clearly in the black of night.

He was wearing dark clothing with a hood that masked his face. When he realized that I was watching him, he threw something in my direction and charged.

I stopped the projectile in mid-air. It was a knife that had been crudely carved from a tree branch. So, my foe knew that I was vampire.

With a wave of my hand, I sent the weapon hurtling back towards him. The point hit him square in the shoulder, bouncing away with a scraping sound.

There was no sign of blood. I wondered if he wore some sort of body armor.

He drew near, brandishing a shortsword of dark wood.

I called upon my magics to charm or confuse him, but I could get no grip on his mind.

No matter. He took a clumsy stab at my chest which I easily evaded. While he recovered his balance, I spun behind him and sank my fangs through his hood.

My teeth met with nothing beneath it, so I grabbed him by the shoulders to hold him still and bit in deeper.
I tasted neither flesh nor blood. Instead, my fangs scraped along the cold bone of his vertebrae.

He shifted and a pain tore through my chest. Stunned, I dropped to the ground gasping. His blade had staked my heart.

My foe threw back his cowl and coughed a dry, rasping laugh. He leered at me from the empty sockets of his bare skull and gloated:

“You should have left when you had the chance, Count. This turf belongs to us skeletons now!”

Freedom came in the presence of a needlework pillow.

Daniel’s mother had made it for him, and he valued it as much as anything he had, pitiful though his belongings were. She couldn’t afford to send him away with very much, making the small things more precious.

When the fire broke out, he knew he had to escape or die. The pillow was the first thing he thought to clutch to himself. He wrapped the soft backing around his hand and plummeted his fist through the small window in his room. The onrush of fresh air cleared his head and he could see again as he climbed through to the outside.

The woman hired to cook for his frat brothers stood in the front of the house holding a kitchen utensil. Her apron looked stark in the early morning gloom.

“Frannie! Is anyone else in there?”

She didn’t respond, only stood, frantically twisting the spatula.

He tried to get her attention but she didn’t hear him.

She must be in shock.

He gazed at the smoke now issuing from the window.

I don’t think I can do this.

There was no one else. Without a backward glance, he ran into the burning house through the front door. The place was eerie in the smokiness. He passed fellow brothers choking on the smoke stumbling toward the light. The familiar tombstone of one of his friends’ doorway appeared through the mist.

He pounded on it. No answer. He tried the knob. Locked.

He said a quick prayer that Chris was not home and propelled himself forward.

He became disoriented and found himself in his own room again.

“What the hell…” he muttered, gasping. Then he saw the body on the floor, a broken CD lying partially visible under the hip.

He couldn’t believe his eyes. He rolled the inert form over.

His slack face stared back.

They’d been trapped in the elevator of a London department store for the past five minutes–trying not to make eye contact with each other–when it happened. Worst-case scenario. One of them farted. In an ideal world the Muzak would have been droning away in the background and the air conditioner running–but not today. Both were out of action, along with the rest of the lift.

“I say, old boy, you could have waited.”

“How do you know it was me?”

“Because I heard you let rip. I can smell it. And I saw your bloody cassock flapping in the breeze.”

“As the good Lord says, let he who is without blame cast the first stone.”

“Why, you priggish little snit. If you weren’t a man of the cloth I’d give you a good, sound thrashing. I boxed for my school and my regiment, don’t you know.”

The priest took a long, slow, deep breath. “Before I took up parishional work,” he said, pausing only to crack his knuckles, “I was a chaplain in the army. I know all too well what your class are like. But, as it happens, I also boxed for my regiment.”

If the lift’s CCTV had been working, it could have told us who struck the first blow. As it was, its two occupants were far too busy brawling to notice that the lift had started moving again–and was now descending very, very fast.

And so it was that the priest’s first task upon meeting his maker was to explain why his final moments had been devoted to beating the living daylights out an elderly gentleman. And that gentleman, a churchwarden at his local place of worship, had to explain why he’d been trying to throttle a priest at the very moment the lift was dashed to pieces at the bottom of the shaft.

Fortunately for both of them, their maker–a stout, laughing, shaven-headed Oriental-looking man in robes, with a pot-bellied stomach–had a sense of humor and promptly reincarnated both of them as kangaroos.

“Bob. Bob. Wake up, Bob. Bob. BOB! Wake up. Hey Bob, how you doing? Your head okay? Good. Here’s a little grammar tip, Bob. ‘Literally’ does not mean ‘a lot.’ When you say you literally have a ton of work to do, that’s not true unless there’s an actual 2,000 pounds of something to do. Okay, Bob? If you drove a forklift and had 2,000 pounds of something to move around, then it’d be appropriate, and maybe even clever. But you can’t drive a forklift, you just sit in the office and make eight times what the rest of us make. You treat us like serfs. Do you even know what a serf is, Bob? You’re not smarter than any of us, Bob. You just happen to knock up a girl whose dad owns the business. And every time you say you’re LITERALLY bored to death by being forced to spend eight hours in this building, Bob, you remind us of just how unfair this whole arrangement is. Guess what, Bob. It ends tonight. I’ve got a couple of the cordless drills we have 500 extra units of. Guess who ordered too many of them, Bob? Guess who doesn’t think it’s his responsibility, Bob? And guess who’s the only guy in this building whose job isn’t on the line because of the screw-up? It’s you, Bob! And that’s all going to end tonight, Bob. I’m going to see how many times I can put this drill through you. I’m thinking ten, Bob, but feel free to try get that up to a dozen or so. You can scream all you want about being literally bored to death, because for once it’ll be true.”

The archaeologists had no patience for Señora Louisa, but that was because none of these people believed in the spirit world. They went about their digging at the Mayan temple as if it was a construction site, and not where so many people had died. But after the third time a cold chill settled on the whole camp and smashed equipment flat, one of the guides insisted on calling Señora Louisa. There were old ghosts here, Señora Louisa felt, older than any she had ever felt. They would not speak Spanish, which would be a problem if they had a message to relay. Some of the scientists here knew the dead languages of the Mayans, and so were willing to translate whatever Señora Louisa might hear. The scientists would probably claim she looked up whatever words she might end up saying, but she was here to appease spirits, not prove herself to scientists. Señora Louisa lit candles, closed her eyes and began praying. She opened herself to the spirit world. She heard some scientists snicker, but did not pay attention to them. It took a while to sense a presence, but when she did she almost fell over from it. This was an enormous soul! Bigger than any she had ever felt! She heard the gasps of the scientists. Was this spirit visible? She opened her eyes, and it was! It was colossal, the size of a house! It had horns and a tail and screamed out like it was on fire! What was this thing? For once, one of the scientists was able to help. He pointed at the spirit and said, shaking, “Triceratops.”

Anish was having a brain fart. What was this thing called? This thing in his hand? Common household item? In every house in the world? Two steel blades, hinged together to cut paper and other stuff? Oh, it was on the tip of his tongue! Anish could remember all of India’s fourteen prime ministers–he ran them through his head in thirty seconds just to prove this memory gap wasn’t across the board–but he couldn’t think of the name of this thing in his hand. He began mimicking its cutting motion with the fingers of his other hand. Come on, toddlers know what this is. It wasn’t a stapler, it wasn’t tape, it was… He was seriously going to have to look this up in the dictionary. Under what? What letter did it start with? Z? No, nothing starts with Z. Something that sounds like Z. S? Anish went through the vowels. “Raj, please pass me the Sa… Hey Raj, pass me the Se… Raj, give me the damn Si…” Scissors! That’s the word! Scissors. Anish felt an immense itch being scratched. He looked at the metal surgical scissors in his hand. Scissors scissors scissors. Anish went back to what he was doing with the scissors, which was cutting the tongue from the girl he killed two days ago. He was hungry, and would fry up her tongue for lunch. What a relief, Anish thought. He seriously thought there might be something wrong with him for a second.

Han carefully moved the dirt out of the hole in the forest, inch by inch with a trowel. He didn’t see any eggs. This was where the eggs were buried! Han was there when the restaurant crew placed them here, under the large tree. Many hundred-year-old eggs were made by modern methods, simply wrapping the eggs in plastic for a few weeks. But the best hundred-year-old eggs were being made the classic Chinese way, buried in the ground until the yolks turned green and the whites turned brown. As dramatic as the process was, they were only aged a few months before they were retrieved and eaten. But those weeks were long enough for Han to apparently forget where he buried them! Han started widening his hole. Did an animal dig them up? No, the earth was smooth all around. Was he under the wrong tree? Han thought there might be other trees that looked like this, but then Han noticed a distinctive softness in the earth. Here they were, the whole dozen of them. Han took the black eggs from the earth. 10, 11, 12 … 13? 14? 18? There were too many eggs. Han dug up someone else’s supply. These had the faintest hint of rice paper around them: Han’s eggs were wrapped in aluminum foil. These eggs were past the point of blackness. They were almost glowing with a greenish paisley pattern. Han held one in his hand. The outside was stiff, but felt yielding on the inside. Were these eggs actually buried for a hundred years? Would they be safe to eat? Safe or not, Han knew people that would be happy to pay large sums of money to risk such a delicacy. As Han contemplated how much to charge for each egg, the egg in his hand began moving. After a hundred years of incubation, it was time to hatch.

It was one thing to still have Christmas decorations up in January, thought Natalie Hunt, but Halloween decorations were something else entirely. Mr. Shorenstein’s fence was still lined with cotton cobwebs, and the front yard was still covered in those pretend cardboard tombstones. A scarecrow with a big jack-o’-lantern head sat on the front porch, and the pumpkin had turned black and rotted. To leave all that ghoulishness up into November was appalling, but to leave it up when the rest of the neighborhood was celebrating Christmas? Natalie Hunt was too polite to say anything to Mr. Shorenstein, of course. She never bumped into him at the market or walking her Pekinese, so she had no way of asking him aside from the unspeakable rudeness of knocking on his front door. Nothing spoke louder than a good example, though, and so Natalie Hunt told her husband to take down their decorations exactly on December 26th. The rest of the neighborhood followed suit a week or two later, and Mr. Shorenstein still didn’t get the message. However rude, it was time for an intervention. She marched over to Mr. Shorenstein’s house, tray of brownies in hand, preparing to spend half an hour listening to his medical problems before addressing the decoration issue. Before she got to the front door she smelled the rotting pumpkin. That was positively the worst smell she had ever encountered! How could Mr. Shorenstein live in such a manner? Almost gagging, she walked to the front door and knocked. A host of flies came from the rotting pumpkin. Then Natalie Hunt saw the rotting face beneath the rotting pumpkin, and understood why Mr. Shorenstein wasn’t paying attention to his decorating.

“It is well known,” said Professor Vanderwijk as he ducked to avoid a flying teacup, “that poltergeist activity is the result of restless spirits possessing furniture and other objects. But what happens—” he jumped over a small rug that was attempting to trip him— “when those occupying spirits displace the souls of the objects themselves?”

“The objects’ souls, Professor?” said Brian, the younger of the old ghost hunter’s two assistants. A flock of knives circled the chandelier in a worrying fashion.

“Of course. Take, for example, that end table beside the chaise lounge. Or, perhaps I should say, that end table that is rapidly hurtling towards the far wall… oh, my.”

“Well, it’s firewood now,” said Janey, Vanderwijk’s other assistant. “What was it?”

“Eighteenth Century, I believe,” said Vanderwijk, raising his voice to be heard over the chandelier, which had begun shaking its crystals into a frenzy. “Possibly from the reign of Louis XV. Is it any wonder that an object exposed to so much history would start to develop its own personality? It might form very strong opinions indeed. Brian?”

Brian didn’t answer. He was on his hands and knees beside the chaise lounge. He stared forward, seeing nothing, and was perfectly still.