MicroHorror

The priest steps down from the pulpit and the dead boy’s open grave, the bell’s bass voice singing the child’s death knell. The sky is changing the guard, the sun staring at the full moon, the clouds like blood-soaked gauze from the child’s wounds, the wind wailing as the storm approaches, the ground misting as if the gates of Hell itself were opening. The grave markers are like sentries, guiding the innocent soul on to Zion.

The priest is confronted by a man, whose footfalls are as quiet as the hallowed ground. The man lifts his cowl on a previously unnoticed serpentine staff, its tip hidden in the leaves of the tree of tears. The act reveals a gaunt man with a widow’s peak, crew cut hair, his eyes the color of blued steel, they are dead as the ore itself. “Hello, Father Rupert,” says the man.

The priest opens his mouth but is silenced by the bells’ roar. “For what purpose do the bells toll?” the priest screams.

“Ask not for whom the death bell tolls,” says the man Poe-tically. “It tolls for thee.” Lightning reinforces his point.

“Who are you?” cries the priest. The man laughs as lightning reveals the man’s true form. The flesh and hair fall from his body, leaving only two cold, dead, steel blue eyes. The serpentine staff becomes not a staff but a scythe; the blade with bored holes meets the black staff with a human skull. The priest flees. He falls into the child’s open grave, but is saved from broken neck by a hand of bone and tendon, held together by some unnatural yet holy force. “No, Father, this is not how you die, though it would be fitting for you to die by the hand of your victim.”

“Why?” begs the priest.

“You die because I say so, but I appear to you personally to assure punishment for your crimes. I am not the judge of your deeds and sins. This is just a step.”

“What are my crimes?” screams the priest, over the storm’s crescendo. The earth, the heavens above and even the bells themselves are crying out.

“Your crimes are many, like hypocrisy, but your gravest is taking a ten-year-old child in the confessional, where he confesses to a gay wet dream. You demand his penance be ten Hail Maries and two rosaries. To cure him of being gay, you say God must be put in him; you bend him over and violate him so hard, you draw blood. You tell him to pull up his bloody underwear and go home, since he is now healed. He dies on the threshold, in his mother’s arms, exsanguinated from a lacerated colon. Then you speak at his funeral, the one you caused. That is your crime for which I am here.”

“The Bible says homosexuality is a sin,” pleads the priest to the Grim Reaper.

“That book may have been written by God but it was edited by man,” says Death. “In your books it says pride is a sin, yet your ‘holiest’ man claims to be infallible on all matters of God. Isn’t that a prideful thing to say? But I digress.” With a swish, the scythe whistles and sings hungrily toward the priest. The blade gorges itself viciously, sliding though bone and muscle, from pelvis to skull, yet touches no flesh. The True Servant of God bends down and snakes his hand into the still chest and pulls out not heart but soul. In a flash, a collar of spikes and blades bite deep into the soul’s neck, and the soul descends into the very bowels of Hell. The body steams, found on the morrow, the blood on his pants linking him to the child’s grave a foot away.

A small sound caught Danny’s attention. He glanced around the darkened bedroom, his gaze finally coming to rest on the closet door. It’s nothing. Probably one of my suits slipped off the hanger; that’s happened before. Or maybe something fell off the shelf.

Resisting the urge to turn on the bedside lamp, he listened to the silence a moment longer, then rolled over onto his right side and concentrated on making his muscles relax. He’d been on edge ever since Mrs. Sydney in 12B had mentioned that the previous tenant had misplaced his twelve-foot pet python just before moving out. How the hell do you misplace something twelve feet long? he wondered.

Danny was terrified of snakes. He couldn’t even look at a picture of one without screaming. The building superintendent denied any knowledge of the reptile when Danny confronted him. An extermination crew had gone through the apartment, but they failed to find anything, not even a cockroach.

Except for the disappearance of Olivia and Jasper Browne’s yappy poodle next door, nothing unusual had occurred since he’d moved into the building two months ago. Everyone agreed that Precious, an accomplished escape artist, had most likely slipped out of the building unnoticed and gotten lost on the city streets.

Relax! There’s nothing in the apartment that shouldn’t be here. Remember what Dr. Pritchett said: Take a deep breath and count to ten before giving in to panic. He held his breath and listened intently. Nothing. He focused his attention on his muscles, tightening and relaxing each muscle as Dr. Pritchett had taught him.

He finally slipped into an uneasy dream. He was in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean, his eyes riveted on a patch of blackness hovering just above the water. Seagulls circled overhead, their raucous cries setting his teeth on edge. As he watched, the menacing blackness formed itself into an old-fashioned radiator, and in the floor behind the radiator, completely hidden from view, was a hole. A sudden wave flowed out of the hole and moved toward him. The boat began to rock.

Danny woke with a start. It took him a few seconds to realize the waterbed was sloshing back and forth. A heavy weight slid across his chest. Danny’s last coherent thought was what Dr. Pritchett could do with his advice.

She wept. She wept for her husband, Dennis. She wept. She wept for her sick son, Richard–but she, and only she, called him Ritzy, for when he was born he resembled royalty, with bright blue eyes, cornsilk-blond hair, and the smoothest, palest, wrinkle-free skin one could imagine.

For the first few months of Ritzy’s life, she would tell whomever came to see Ritzy that he was a gift from God.

But being the small town it was, those that had known Dennis and Fay the longest, well, they began to talk after visiting Richard. See, Fay had curly black hair, brown eyes, and was a bit of an eater. While Dennis, even before he got sick, didn’t have a hair on his head. So Jerry, Dennis’s friend since grade school, revealed to those that would listen that Dennis had also had black hair once, and since Dennis also had brown eyes, Jerry posed the question: How could Fay and Dennis have a child with blue eyes and blond hair?

Fay wept. Fay wept for Jerry. It was Jerry who stopped by the day Fay and Dennis had packed up their car to go on “vacation.” It was Jerry who noticed Dennis did not take his fishing gear, for Dennis always took his fishing gear on vacation. Thus, it was Jerry who was the first to die after visiting Richard. Some said it was the look Richard gave Jerry, for no one could deny there was something not ordinary about Richard’s eyes, though Fay thought everything about her Ritzy was normal and innocent.

See, Fay had wanted to find happiness in her husband, Dennis, but as is the wont of humanity, we must leave something of ourselves behind, no matter what the cost. Fay and Dennis had tried for years to have a child, and after some time it became obvious one or both were at fault. With age came desperation, so they reached outside the community: to a clinic two towns over, to a place where promises were made, and kept.

Still, Fay refused to believe her son was anything but innocent. But Dennis knew. He knew what they had created, what the men and women in the white coats and white masks had put inside Fay. Perhaps if he, if they, knew the whole truth… Fay wept for Dennis.

It was Dennis who began to look ill upon Richard. Dennis did not call him Ritzy; he did not even call him Richard. He called him “the child.” Soon, “the child” began to look ill upon Dennis. Moreover, “the child” filtered something through that look and Dennis’s ill took form as a growth somewhere inside his body. But soon the growth brought forth pain; and that pain brought forth bleeding; and that bleeding brought forth the radiation treatments; and the radiation treatments brought forth infections; and the infections brought forth death. Fay wept for Dennis.

Those people who once talked about Richard began to whisper about “the child,” and soon even the whispers no longer carried on the wind as fear squelched all originations of Richard, Ritzy, or even “the child.” Then the people from the clinic came to take “the child,” and Fay wept. Fay wept for the men and women from the clinic for what they had put inside her, but mostly, Fay wept for herself, for now she was alone.

Her knees hurt from kneeling on the kitchen floor, but what choice did she have? She had to keep eating. It was the only way she could think of to counteract the pills. The company’s ad had promised she would see the inches fall off after taking just two of their once-a-week pills. The ad hadn’t lied.

The beginning was easy. She swallowed a tablet with eight ounces of water on Monday morning and then ate whatever she wanted. By the end of the second week, she’d lost five pounds. At the end of the first month it was twenty. She was elated. All of the other diets had failed her, but it wasn’t her fault. Many of those damn diets didn’t let her eat anything.

She stopped taking the pills after three months and forty-seven pounds. She’d reached her goal. But something was wrong. She continued to lose weight. In fact, the more she ate, the more she lost.

Her friends accused her of being anorexic. “How else could she drop from 167 to 98 pounds?” she’d heard them say behind her back. She couldn’t tell them that for the past two weeks she’d spent her days on the floor eating as much as she could, as fast as she could. They would think she was crazy.

She paused to rest her jaw, sat back on her heels and looked at her body—taut skin stretched over jutting bones, breasts no more than two nipples, arteries pulsing. She’d stopped looking in the mirror. Her face reminded her of a character in a John Carpenter movie.

She hadn’t slept in three days, she was afraid to stop eating. She saw ten more fall off her naked torso and watched them squirm away. She needed to consume them before they died and lost their potency, she’d told herself. She tried her best, but the inches were falling off faster than she could retrieve them.

“I saw this movie on cable just before I got here,” he said to me. I looked at the People Magazine in front of my face and realized that I was not going to have quiet. I like silence before the application, but this guy with the black T-shirt and almost shaven face was obviously new. I could sense the waves of excitement and anxiety coming from him.

I took myself from the slick pages of celebrities and smiled. “So you saw a movie this morning.”

“Yeah, yeah, I did. It was this flick about drug mules. You know drug mules. Swallowing balloons of dope and flying into the States.”

“I know what drug mules are. I saw a movie about them too,” I said.
He leaned in to me and his breath reeked of garlic and misuse. “So these guys swallow like forty of them, sometimes coated in honey to help it go down, because it’s a tough swallow.”

“Yeah, that’s what it looked like in the movie I saw too.”

The guy didn’t say anything, just stared at me, as if waiting for me to say something else. I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I picked up the magazine again and he finally spoke. “So, uhm, is this like that?”

“This?” I asked. “The application?”

“Uh, yeah, I mean they told me that we have to swallow a lot of them before we’re ready to travel. Like we’re mules.”

“It’s different, man. I mean, they’re just swallowing balloons. Balloons don’t wiggle, they don’t kick going down your throat.”

His eyes pinpricked and he whispered, “They kick.”

“Course they kick. You think that a plague of evil going down your throat ain’t going to be a little hostile in the process?”

“So are they like bugs? Are we swallowing bugs?”

“No, they’re demons. and don’t you call them bugs while they’re resting in your belly. If you want to keep your belly. They might be called Satan’s Locusts, but they got royalty about them. They think so at any rate, and you’d be smart to agree.”

“How do we get them out of you when we get to the assigned city?”

“Don’t worry about that. They’ll let you know. Just open up your mouth, close your eyes and ride the pain. There is a lot of pain, but anyone they recruited for this has got to be aware of that. Pain.”

“What happens when they’re released?”

“I don’t really know. Havoc. Death. Stuff.”

The guy, who was looking younger and younger to me, put on a brave grin. “So how long have you been doing this line of work?”

“I don’t really know. Time gets kind of misplaced. I can tell you that this is my seventeenth trip.” This silenced him. I don’t why, but it did. So I got to pick up the copy of People and look at the happy faces. I don’t think I ever read it, I just gaze at it. Soon enough, the man from the application room came in still wearing his surgical greens. I always wished he would put on fresh ones, ones not splattered in blood, but I guess that kind of nicety never occurs to him. The name he called was the guy, the new one. The guy went in slowly. He didn’t even glance my way.

I was staring at the wall, bored, when the screaming started. I didn’t even get any vicarious glee out of the new guy’s pain. Because the truth was, soon enough, the screaming would be mine.

Hurley scooped up a handful of dirt and sifted it through his fingers. The soil was fine and rich and moist. This year he’d finally make a crop. The tomatoes would grow well in this. He began to plant. After an entire day in the sun he was done. His clothes were soaked through with sweat and he could feel the distant threat of a sunburn in the offing. It was worth it, though. Looking over the rows of plants he was glad that he had gone through all of the preparation over the last few months. Satisfied that he had done right, Hurley slept through the night.

When he awoke it was with a sense that he had forgotten to do something. He was halfway through his shower when it hit him: there was still one in the basement. He hadn’t processed the last of them, which meant that the garden hadn’t been ready. There should have been twelve of them, chopped up and mixed with the soil one per month for a year. Somehow he had neglected to do the last one. It had been his excitement at being ready to plant. Perhaps it wasn’t too late, he thought.

Hurley found the drugged boy in his basement and chopped off his head with the old ax. That done, he tossed the head in a steel drum with the others. They were useless. Then he dismembered the rest of the body. It took hours to get the bits small enough. He gathered all of it up into a double-layer garbage bag and carried the wet mess out to the garden. Hurley fell to his knees and began slopping handfuls of the boy into the dirt around his plants. He kneaded it into the topsoil, pushing and squeezing to get the mix right. As he worked he started to weep that it was probably too late. It would be another year without tomatoes. He was still on his knees weeping and working the remains into the rich soil when the policemen arrived.

Burt grabbed his daughter’s MP3 player by mistake, and so half of the songs during his jog down Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River were rap. He skipped three rap songs in a row, and then Burt heard the most inspirational music in the world: Rocky. When did she find this song? Burt surged ahead, running. That was such a good movie. Never mind that Rocky ran eight different directions in order to jog through Philly the way he did. That guy had heart, and that was all you needed in life. The sequels were good, too. He was only a few minutes from the famous steps of the art museum. It was corny to run up them, but Burt never had the music in his ears before. His aching legs got new life as the music built. Burt’s green windbreaker pressed flat against him as he sped toward the museum, getting to the steps just when Rocky did. He ran like he never had in his life, the music carrying him up. His heart clamped down for a beat, but then it felt fine. Burt pounded up the steps, higher and higher, taking the last ones two at a time. He made it! Burt jumped up and down, not caring how stupid it looked. What a great feeling! He had heard of athlete’s highs, but never felt it before. Burt ran in place, spinning around while pumping his arms in the air. A crowd was around someone lying at the bottom of the steps. Someone trip? Hope they’re okay. Burt continued pumping his fists, the music still in crescendo, the best feeling in his life, not realizing that the person at the bottom of the stairs was wearing a green windbreaker, and was not okay.

Madison’s wish on her birthday was for her toys to come to life. Her stupid big sister Maudy said that only babies believed in birthday wishes. But Madison’s wish came true! Madison woke up in the middle of the night, and Mr. Duckie was quacking on top of the covers. It didn’t look a lot like Mr. Duckie, because now he was a real duck, but he was still wearing his top hat. Madison heard neighing, and on the other side of the room was a gigantic horse, taking up half the bedroom! The purple saddle was the same as on her My Little Pony! Wow! Real horses were big! Madison heard crying in her toy chest. She opened it up, and a monkey and puppies jumped out. A baby was at the bottom, a real baby, blinking its eyes just like her toy baby used to. Yay, a real baby! All of her toys were real! Madison picked up the real baby, and shooed the monkey away, and then pulled a puppy onto her bed to play with along with the baby. Everyone was here–well, except for Clyde. Stupid Maudy took Clyde because she said Clyde was too cool for Madison to play with. Madison heard screaming from Maudy’s room. Good. Now that Clyde was real, too, he would tell her that he belonged to Madison, not stupid Maudy. Clyde was such a good teddy bear.

The car plowed into the creature, the metal of its hood folding back from the impact as the beast was thrown through the air to land roughly on the gravel road several yards away. The beast lay in a pool of blood with the white of its fractured ribs protruding out of its fur. Mark unfastened his seatbelt and staggered out of the wrecked vehicle onto the road. So far things were going exactly as he’d planned but he knew at best he’d only bought the team a few minutes to get into position. The lycanthrope was far from dead.

Sam, who’d been the bait to lure the monster out onto the road, was already closing on the beast, his AK-47 chattering as its rounds tore and shredded the monster’s flesh. Alex followed in Sam’s wake preparing himself for his part in the team’s plan to take the lycanthrope alive.

The wolf stood up. Its bones were already healed though it still leaked blood from the dozens of bullet holes from Sam’s continued attack. “Now!” Sam screamed at Alex. Alex locked eyes with the beast as its howls of rage and pain filled the night air. Alex strained to hold on to the thing’s mind with his own. The beast’s rage was red and powerful. Blood poured from Alex’s nose and trickled from the corners of his eyes as he clamped down on the thing’s anger and switched it off. The lycanthrope stood motionless for a second then collapsed onto the roadway. Alex himself fell to his knees, his face a tortured look of pain. He watched as Mark strolled over to the creature and fired a massive tranquilizer dart, point blank, into its skull.

“You can let go now, Alex,” he heard Sam saying to him. Alex released his hold on the beast’s mind as Sam helped him to his feet. Alex wiped at the blood on his face with the back of his hand. “I… I didn’t think I was going to be able to take him there for a second. It must have been Jacob’s psi training.”

“But you did,” Sam smiled. “Jacob knew better than to try to leave the Team, Alex. Someone had to bring him in before he killed anyone else.”

Mark walked over to join them where they stood. “Trust me, Alex, it was for the best. The Team always takes care of its own. Jacob was a valuable member but you know he wasn’t exactly stable. This was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“We’d better pack him up and get out of here,” Sam informed them. “We’ve still got that bloodsucker over in New Bern to deal with tonight.”

Alex managed to nod weakly as the team’s cleanup vans made their way down the road towards them.

There are two sides for everything in the universe. The side we see and accept as fact and the other side of speculation and faith. Proving or disproving faith with cold hard fact was what Millie Hamilton had spent her whole life doing. Her goal was to answer the unanswerable questions of life. Who we are, who we’ve been and of course where are we going, but none of those occupied her mind more than this one: Is there a God?

She’d spent twenty years off and on trying to construct a mathematical formula to scientifically prove or disprove the existence of God and the heavens. Late one night Millie finally found her correlation but not exactly the one she was looking for. She accidentally found she was very close to proving the existence of God’s counterpart, the Devil. Millie figured that with the right number combinations she could actually catch a brief glimpse of Hell.

The problem was Millie was right. When the numbers lined up the window to Hell opened up, releasing Satan into our world. Millie never stopped to think if she could close it or not.

Before she hanged herself, Millie wrote a simple note: I’m sorry.

So began two million years of darkness.

Good going, Millie. Thanks a lot.