MicroHorror

Something yanked on the fishing line, shaking loose water diamonds. Duke yelled to his girlfriend Vannie, “I’ve got it! I’ve got something!”

“Great,” she said walking across the deck of the boat to his seat, her swimsuit revealing more than proper folks should see. Vannie had hoped that some of the other ships were getting a good, long look at her stuff. I’ve got it going on, she knew. I can flaunt it. But Vannie was more concerned with her boyfriend’s catch at the moment.

“It’s big,” Duke said, pulling the rod back, biceps and pectorals swelling.

“Don’t lose it this time,” Vannie told him, scrunching her lips together. “We can’t have you not catch anything on Spring Break.”

“I won’t,” Duke assured her, reeling in the line. “It’s mine. I’m using my new system of hooks–twenty of them.”

Vannie smiled. “Give ‘em hell.”

The line jiggled side to side violently, sending ripples over the azure-tinted ocean. Duke reeled in, but his catch yanked back. He felt the line shudder.

“I’ll get the camera,” said Vannie, and hurried to the other end of the boat. Duke strained to bring the fish up. Bubbles erupted through the water. Duke pulled up on the rod harder. It shuddered again.

Then it went slack.

“Dammit,” he said to himself.

He reeled the line in savagely, and when the hook reached the surface he yanked up on the rod and threw it the deck. Still muttering swear words, he looked down at his new systems of hooks.

Sunlight glimmered off a pair of goggles–ragged, red, and meaty.

Duke sighed. “Damn. I lost another one.”

Fin woke up to find himself in the room at the back of the GrinonCorp mining ship, where he had lived for the past three years but failed to get used to. It was loud, for the most part it was boring, and it didn’t feel right. He was used to noise, but he was used to noises on Earth, not the continual drilling and slamming of the mining operations. When GrinonCorp had found grinsteel on the asteroids just past Pluto, the executives had supposedly tried to relocate only its childless workers. They had been almost 100% successful too, making eight-year-old Fin the only youth on the ship.

When Fin asked the adults about the clouds outside the porthole, he was told it was the dust left from long-gone galaxies and rocks. When he asked why they seemed to make faces, they laughed and said it was just a coincidence and his imagination, like the clouds on Earth. The clouds on Earth had never been in his nightmares though, like the one he had just woken from.

Remembering where he really was, Fin looked around the room, terrified of the silent darkness but also afraid to break the silence and tell the computer to turn the light on. The room was darker than it usually was, and when he looked at the porthole he realized why. The clouds had become a thick fog, blocking almost all of the light that would have reached his room from the Sun otherwise. They seemed to be getting thicker, making it almost impossible for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Finally he was able to make out some shapes, and Fin was careful not to move any other part of his body as he twisted his head to look around the whole room. He saw nothing out of place, but the air felt different in a way he couldn’t place.

He remembered one of the miners telling him that the most dangerous direction was above you, because you don’t pay attention to it. He looked up at the ceiling, and saw why the air was wrong.

The ventilation slots had been blocked, much like the porthole, by a layer of the fog. Fin’s breathing became more rapid, and he thought about getting up and running to the door. He looked to where the door should have been, but the crack of light that usually surrounded it wasn’t visible. Instead he could barely make out a gray mist. The noise from the mines that had always been present, day and night, was not audible, and Fin suddenly yelled for the computer to turn on the light.

He couldn’t hear himself yelling it though, and the room remained dark. The fog was slowly coming down from the ceiling towards him, and Fin jumped off the bed. He started to reach for the button to open the door, but the cloud spread over it like a kind of slime, and the red button disappeared behind the gray. Fin was having more and more trouble breathing, and when he tried to yell at the computer again it only made it worse.

The clouds neared the top of his head, and Fin dropped to his knees trying to find fresh air, but the mist continued its descent. Ten minutes later, the clouds had left the noiseless ship and were moving towards the Sun.

He woke up with the taste of dust on his lips. Sleep had glued his eyes shut. He reached to rub his eyes, but his hand held fast to his side. Another tug, a ripping sound, and his hand came free. Trapped by the bedsheet, he reasoned.

He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand trying to focus. He felt a coarse cloth against his face. Did someone bandage his hands? He remembered drinking too much whiskey at the pool hall last night, and then a fight over some chick dressed like an Egyptian queen. She kept bending over the pool table with her gold lamé bodysuit stretched tight, revealing plenty of eye candy for the boys. Her boyfriend dressed up, too. Looked like a body builder with gold sandals and friggin’ eye makeup. A struggle, a knife pulled from a leather scabbard, and then nothing. His mind felt as empty as the smoky hall without furniture or fixtures or pool tables. It gave him no sense of place, no orientation. He continued to rub his eyes.

If he was hurt, why didn’t he feel the pain? And after what he downed in whiskey sours, why didn’t his head feel like hell? He felt nothing, but that suited him just fine.

The sound of small feet scurried in every direction. Then quiet again.

He felt nothing. No rush of breathing; no pounding of his heart. No fear. How strange. He reached to feel for a heartbeat. His palm pressed down on his chest, met some resistance, and then broke through a wafer-thin layer of skin. His hand skewered on the broken end of a rib. Must have been some fight last night. The sensation reminded him of punching through a piñata as a kid.

Again he felt nothing. Must be a dream, a nightmare, a drunken stupor. He’d had plenty of those during his years as a hustler. Sure, when the first rays of dawn stabbed across his bloodshot eyes, he’d wake up in his own bed with a head-pounding, God-have-no-mercy hangover.

He’d just close his eyes again and sleep it off. But he couldn’t close his eyes. If was as if his eyelids were made of translucent cloth, letting just enough light through to give form to the shadowy world beyond.

The meager light revealed more of his surroundings now and his bed looked to be nothing more than a cement slab covered with a linen sheet. And dust. Everywhere the dust! How was he able to breath in this thick air without coughing?

Swinging his legs over the edge of the stone slab, he rose to stand but crumbled to the floor instead. He heard a crash and watched a perfect mushroom dust cloud rise in the air above him. A clay jar lay broken before his face. A vitreous jelly emerged. Its wet talons spread and seemed to beckon a pack of rats together. They licked with their leather tongues at the fetid substance. Once or twice a rat would stop and stare at him with dark, lifeless eyes. Sensing no threat, the rat would continue to venture deeper into the jar. Other rats followed.

Then he felt a stabbing deep in his head, as if someone had placed a thousand shards of glass inside his brain and was squeezing the hemispheres tightly together to torture him. He screamed, but made no sound. The hangover?

He watched as several rats emerged from the broken jar. They were tugging on what looked like a wrinkled chunk of meat. Rodent teeth gnawed and chewed and his brain shredded before his eyes. He felt every tug and rip and gnaw.

A rat approached him and slipped inside his gaping mouth and peeked through his eye socket, rubbing its filthy whiskers against the orbital bone while chewing on a piece of gray meat.

When I first opened my little exhibit, word spread like plague inside the walled city, and soon waves of citizens came from all walks of life to see my captured beast. Those born with purple blood stood silently in line behind peasants. Farmers stood behind generals. Husbands were sandwiched by their wives and their harlots. All crowded into my poor little tent to see the beast I had obtained at great personal expense.

Each evening I would stand at the box office and graciously accept the lovely coins. People paid. People entered. Yet before my eyes the line only seemed to grow and grow and grow…

I quickly determined the source of the problem. Once inside the tent, no one felt the urge to leave. Onlookers would gawk at the beast for hours in awed fascination. When I would gently suggest they head for the exit in order to give others a turn, they would inevitably turn cold and surly. When my suggestions became more forceful, I would come away with a bloodied nose and a bruised face.

With a cold damp rag pressed against my face, I watched and I thought. After two hours I was struck by sweet inspiration. Within minutes I found myself standing alone.

The crowds still come in overwhelming numbers. We do eight shows a day now. Business is booming. How, you ask?

It’s child’s play. When I feel that the audience has gotten value for their coin, I simply walk on stage and unlock the cage door…

Kevin had never seen anything like this on eBay before. It was a soul. A human soul. Someone was offering a soul, trapped apparently in an ancient-looking green bottle according to the posted photo. He could see a wispy figure peering out of the bottle, a pale, female face, pretty, young, with long hair. The description said it was the soul of a nineteen-year-old Irish girl from the 17th Century.

The bidding had been furious among several bidders obviously in competition. BEEZ666 and GODBOY3 were in desperate one-upmanship now; the others were probably just horny guys hoping to purchase a hot naked chick in a bottle, even one in a ghostly state. They had dropped out early when the bidding go too intense and too high. BEEZ666 and GODBOY3 were into the tens of thousands of dollars at this point. Kevin decided to get in on this before the time ran out, which was soon. Kevin had plenty of money, trust fund, but very little sense.

He entered a quick bid, a very high one just to declare his winning intentions. He seldom lost at money contests. Counter bids from BEEZ666 and GODBOY3 came in nearly immediately, and it became a tight race until the Time Left finally ran out. Kevin’s final bid of $80,001 won.

Cool, he thought to himself. Now he owned a real, honest-to-goodness human soul, captured in a bottle since the 1600s. This was something worth a lot of money, something really special. Not that money meant very much to Kevin, except that he could get whatever he wanted, whatever momentarily caught his fancy, with it.

Soon the package arrived from UPS. Kevin excitedly torn it open and carefully unwrapped the musty-smelling, heavy emerald bottle. The ghostly girl swam around inside it, pressing the sides with her pale, sweet face and tiny palms. Kevin turned it around and around, and the soul kept moving to stay focused on him.

She was beautiful in a phantom sort of way and naked which aroused Kevin a little. She smiled attractively at him and pushed uselessly against the wax spout at the bottle’s top, obviously wanting Kevin to remove it. She mouthed ‘please’ and clasped her hands to her heart, begging to be set free.

Kevin considered the request and the bottle for a long while, watching her naked body pressed tightly against the smooth green glass. “All right,” Kevin said, “but if I let you out, do you promise not to fly away and to go back into the bottle when I tell you to?”

The soul girl nodded earnestly, crossing her heart, and it looked like translucent tears streamed down her cheeks. Kevin broke the centuries-old wax, and the little white wisp flew quickly out. As soon as she cleared the bottle’s rim, and new air from the 21st Century struck her, she transformed in size, color and hideousness into a massive red demon.

“Who–” Kevin stuttered, stumbling backwards, stunned and suddenly fearful. “Who are you?”

“My name is Legion,” the demon bellowed in a hellish voice, “for we are many.” And then it bit off Kevin’s head.

I killed a girl when I was twelve. It was an accident, that first one. She just made me so angry. I only wanted to talk to her. Sit by her and talk to her. It was lunch time at school. There was an open seat next to her. She couldn’t be nice, she had to humiliate me in front of everyone.

But it wasn’t her fault, really. She didn’t know what I was, didn’t know what I was capable of. I didn’t know then. They found her in her bed the next day. She had simply stopped breathing. I didn’t know it was me at the time. It wasn’t until much later that I made the connection.

Sometimes they go peacefully like she did. Sometimes not. The guys that beat me up in ninth grade weren’t that lucky. Their bodies were a bloody pile of mush when they found them. It took a long time to sort out which parts belonged to which kid. They should have left me alone.

It’s not like I enjoy it, though. I hate it. I hate it. Someone gets me angry enough and they just die. Sometimes quietly, sometimes violently. A guy cut me off in traffic one time and died almost instantly from a heart attack. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but for one second I was so angry at him, and he didn’t have a chance.

If you don’t believe me, I’ll understand. I have a hard time with it myself. How can a person kill someone just by getting angry at them? I wish I had that answer, but I don’t. I don’t know.

If you want real proof you could ask my girlfriend, if it wasn’t too late. Brain aneurysm. It was a stupid argument and I lost my temper. God, I really hate myse

“I don’t know what’s up,” said George, “but I just don’t feel the rush anymore that used to come with ending someone’s life.”

“Well,” taunted Harvey, “you could try killing something less helpless than a small rodent.”

“Fuck you,” responded George. “Little kids are just fine. They’re so pure and innocent and naïve; they invariably cry out in agony! What could be more fun than that? Besides, why go after something that could resist, escape and either kill me or call the cops?”

“Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the fun in the way you do things? Where’s the thrill of the hunt? Where’s the challenge? Where’s the sense of accomplishment?”

“It’s not about challenge or a sense of accomplishment. It’s about relieving stress. It’s about having power over another human being. It’s about the helpless screams of the victims, and the blood that splatters everywhere. It’s about getting revenge on humanity for fucking up my life by taking one of theirs. Why make it hard on yourself?”

“Well,” said Harvey, “for one thing, as fun as it is to see a child in agony, it’s much more fun to see an adult in such conditions. When you kill someone of equal size and strength, there’s your power rush. Also, it’s more like a game for me. Killing is just the cherry on the sundae. The real pleasure comes from stalking, hunting, terrorizing my prey.”

A long, deafening silence filled the air in the dimly lit room.

After several minutes, Harvey broke the silence with a question. “Hey, where’s Johnny anyway?”

“He’s still dealing with his walls. He thinks he almost has enough blood to make the yelling stop.”

“Hm… I wonder what’ll happen when he does make it stop,” posed George.

“I don’t know. But if he stops killing, we should kill him and fuck his body.”

“That sounds nice. I’ve been really depressed lately. Maybe that’ll cheer me up.”

“It just won’t stop, my skin seems to mock me, as I try to relieve this infernal sensation. I scratched off the first layer, only to have the torture renewed on the next. The pain of my nails digging into the flesh is minuscule compared to the itch.”
–August 1st

On a hot August day, Larry McDonald left his highrise office at Globetech, to head home.
Larry had planned on evening of relaxing in front of his television, but the true events to follow were far from what he had planed.

“I’ve tried everything, rubbing alcohol only burns, but any kind of distraction is satisfying, and will continue until the bottle is gone.”
–August 1st

Larry wanted to walk home, as he did to work. His home was not far from the office, and as he walked he wondered why he didn’t exercise more.

“This is the second day with the itch; I’ve decided to take a bath to combat it. As soon as I entered the water, it turned a red hue, and the stinging returned when the water touched my arms, scratched raw.”
-August 2nd

As Larry neared home, the sun started to set, and he could see the outline of a man approaching him in the distance.

The man walked with a limp and seemed to be wearing an overcoat of some sort. As he neared, his features came into view and so did his sickness.

The man lifted his head to look at Larry; vomit dribbled down his chin, and his skin was a blood red color. “Help…” he groaned. When he did the skin around his mouth cracked and peeled revealing the raw, tender layer beneath.

“I looked in the mirror for the first time since I got home; my flesh looks as if it was melting off my bones. The itch is still here of course, just less and has given way to a burning.”
–August 2nd

“Look, there is a hospital not far from here,” Larry tried to convince the man.

“I can’t, I need help now,” the sick man argued, then his mouth opened wide and he started to tremble, as if the weight of his own body was too much for his legs to support.

“Hey, just lie down and I’ll call for help, ok?” The man did not; he continued to stand and tremble.

“Just lie down,” Larry said as he put his hand on the sick man’s shoulder; his body was hot, his blood was boiling in his veins. “What’s wrong with you?”

Larry’s answer was found in a burst of fluid that streamed from the man’s mouth. The bile landed on Larry’s face, some in between his parted lips.

“The itch has moved. It’s coming from the inside, a place I cannot scratch. I poured the last of the rubbing alcohol down my throat.”
–August 3rd

“Get the fuck away from me!” Larry yelled. He knocked over the sick man with his briefcase and ran home.

“The torture continues, I managed to find my way around the house, and I also found the only scratch for my itch, a loaded 45.”
–Aug…

When Larry got home he immediately took a shower, but soon after his skin began to itch.