MicroHorror

Colleen was more confused than afraid when she walked out of the kitchen and found her neighbor standing in the middle of her living room.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

Without saying a word, Gerald casually walked over and punched her hard in the stomach. Colleen dropped instantly to the floor gasping for breath. Gerald grabbed her by the hair and dragged her into the bedroom. When the air finally returned to her lungs, Colleen began to scream.

Gerald picked Colleen up and threw her onto the bed, tying her arms and legs to the bedposts. “Are you going to be quiet or do I have to hit you again?” Gerald asked through clenched teeth.

She just nodded her head, tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes. Gerald tore her dress down the front and ripped her bra and panties off. He stared at her naked body, while Colleen silently whimpered.

“I’ll do whatever you want, just don’t kill me,” Colleen begged.

Her voice broke Gerald’s trance sending him into a rage. “You think I’m stupid, that I wouldn’t notice. You think you can just walk among us.”

“What are you talking about?” Colleen whispered.

“I know you’re not human. Nobody has skin that perfect.”

“You’re crazy,” Colleen said, as she started thrashing on the bed, screaming for help.

Gerald walked calmly to the kitchen and came back with a small paring knife. Colleen stopped screaming, and her eyes opened wide, when Gerald approached the bed, knife in hand.

“Please, you don’t want to do this; you’re making a big mistake. I have nice skin but it isn’t perfect. Take a closer look before you do anything drastic,” Colleen pleaded.

Gerald stuffed the torn panties into her mouth to shut her up. Colleen shook her head back and forth violently when he brought the small knife up to her face.

Gerald put one of his calloused hands on her forehead to hold her steady. She let out a muffled scream when his knife bit into her flesh just below her right ear. He cut down under the jaw line and around to her other ear. Her screams stopped and her eyes glazed over as she went into shock. He removed his hand from her forehead and cut up along her hairline from ear to ear. He stepped back to admire his work. Blood was pouring out of the cut along the scalp, saturating the pillow below. He reached down below her jaw and grabbed the skin along the incision and tugged. This brought a fresh batch of screams from Colleen until she mercifully passed out from the pain. He managed to pull the skin from the lower half of her face up over the chin to her mouth where it got caught. He used his paring knife to trim the skin around her lips allowing him to pull the rest of her face off with little resistance.

He was shocked when he discovered that she didn’t look like an alien beneath her perfect skin. He panicked; maybe she was human after all. He looked down at the mutilated body of his neighbor and realized that no one would understand. Adrenaline pumped into his body as he raced next door to his house. He headed straight for the bathroom and turned on the faucet. He set the knife on the counter and cupped his hands under the cool water and splashed it on his face to calm himself down. He looked up at his reflection in the mirror and to his horror noticed his own perfect skin. With a trembling hand he picked up the bloody knife and brought it to his face.

The smell in the room was like rotten eggs. Someone was puking behind me.

His body was strapped in the chair, hands tied behind his back. He screamed about a second chance.

“It’s too late!” Johnny yelled, not looking at him.

No one would go near him.

His bloody head was on the floor. His eyes were opened wide, darting around to each one of us.

He licked his cracked bleeding lips, not sure what was going on.

“Help me!” Blood poured out of his mouth.

I walked toward him, put my boot on his head, and stepped down hard.

The grease dripped off of the grills slowly at first. The grease that was on the floor slithered across the tiles into one giant, boiling, disgusting puddle. As the puddle grew and grew, and began to coalesce and coagulate into a monstrous ball of cholesterol, the grease that had not yet joined the party moved faster so as to catch up. Then out of the trash cans came flying all sorts of deliciously wretched things: burnt hamburger meat, moldy buns, soggy French fries. Eventually, plastic forks and spoons and knives decided to contribute themselves to the forming abomination. The mass of fast-food waste stepped into the oven where the cookies were baked and, a minute later, out stepped one of the most disgusting creatures I’d ever seen. The beast was dark brown in color, and had skin that resembled that of a severe burn victim. It was round like a deformed meatball. Instead of hands, this monstrosity had fork-arms and its feet were bent spoons. It had a tail, the point of which was a knife. The demon had no eyes or ears, but rather seventeen mouths, each of which contained at least twenty razor-sharp teeth and a forked tongue.

“Excellent,” I said. “I shall call you ‘King McDonald.’”

Would you like demise with that?

The lighting is dim, and dank are the halls of a room long untapped by its owners. Buildings, like creatures, can grow feral, perhaps turning on their owners, perhaps turning to the wild suburbia to find suitable prey. And there it festers, hidden from light by walls built long ago to keep intruders at bay–walls that have since closed in and tightened protectively like the coils of a snake around its prey.

The floor is stained, black-dried blood marking its deathcry upon cement, twisted in anguish. Chains rattle above; suspended at varying heights, half-faded into the darkness of a pitless ceiling, are the cages. Steel floored and barred, three-foot square and gleaming like knifepoints in the dim light, they hold what was once life and will soon become prey to the beast.

An arm can be seen, severed and bloodied, fingers clenched in death and reaching for freedom. Freedom would not come, not to this poor soul–or, at least, to this soul’s appendage. Blood, darkened by the air, is suspended from the fingertips, threatening to fall and disturb the half-congealed puddle below.

And on. A mesh of body parts, twisted and writhing for inanimate freedoms in their cages, dripping their soulless blood unto the cement, falling like tears of a shattered and bloody heart. They would cry out, if only they had been spared their mouths.

No one would hear them.

A fell breeze lifts, carrying dank air from one dusky window through the void of humanity within, sending ripples through the stagnant crimson pools. The sound of fluttering paper. A whirlwind, a tornado of yellowed notes and hand-scrawled tales of that which had been important at one time and since discarded, the stained papers of a business left to decay for want of humanity.

The wind dies down, and the papers settle, floating to rest in pools of blood, soaking it into their sparse texture.

The eaves groan, the walls sigh, the foundation settles.

The werehouse has sated its hunger tonight.

“The phone call is coming from inside the house.”

Those words from the police officer on the other end of the phone sent an electric shock through Michelle’s nervous system. The lunatic who had been frightening her with phone calls all night was right here in the house with her.

Michelle was sixteen and on her first babysitting job for this new family to the neighborhood, the Woodhouses. Their four-year-old son, Nicholas, was sleeping upstairs. Otherwise the house was empty. Well, apparently not.

The officer on the phone said he was dispatching a car and told Michelle to get out of the house immediately, but Michelle wasn’t really listening at this point. She hung up the phone while the officer was still talking, took a deep, cleansing breath, steadied her nerves and rushed into the immaculate kitchen, looking for a weapon. Michelle grabbed the biggest knife she could find in the cutlery block. She had to go upstairs and get Nicholas before she could flee the house.

The phone rang again, and Michelle knew it was him, the stalker, the maniac, maybe the killer, who wanted to prolong her torture before he finally revealed himself and did God-knows-what to her. Was he hiding upstairs or downstairs in some dark corner, Michelle wondered, shaking despite her attempts at self-control.

The second floor was pitch black and so far away from the end of the grand stairway as Michelle slowly began to climb the steps, hugging the wall for support, holding the knife out in front of her. Then, she heard a noise; did it come from Nicholas’s room? Michelle couldn’t determine, but it fueled her desire to get Nicholas and run out of this house as fast as her legs could carry the both of them.

A scream, well, a gurgling kind of sound, came from the second floor, and it propelled Michelle to run up the rest of the steps, stumbling in the darkness, then bursting into Nicholas’s room, which had its lights on now, waving the knife wildly about like a mad woman, hoping she might hit the stalker. But she found something very different from what she had expected.

The stalker lay dead on the carpet, blood oozing from a thousand separate, wicked, deep cuts. His eyes were frozen open in unbelieving horror.

Nicholas, his little eyes glowing red like a demon’s, hovered two feet over his bed in a sitting posture, a chilling smile on his pretty face. He telekinetically continued juggling a dozen dripping razor blades, circling them in the air with a tiny finger. He turned to Michelle and said, “I don’t like strangers in my house.” Michelle dropped the knife and began trembling uncontrollably.

“I’m thirsty,” Nicholas continued calmly. ”Bloodletting always makes me thirsty. How about some juice?”

They say that cameras steal your soul. If this is the case, Cassius was completely dead. Really, that wasn’t too far from the truth. After all, he was a zombie. You know, there are a lot of stereotypes surrounding zombies, like that they’re ugly or unintelligent. They’re sort of pariahs even in the undead community just because their flesh decays a bit faster than that of vampires. But damn it, Cassius would be a model some day. He knew it. Or an actor perhaps! Although his acting dreams were sort of shot down when he auditioned for Corpse Bride and was turned away because “the world just isn’t ready for a zombie transvestite movie star.” This pissed him off, because that’s why he was killed in the first place. When would the world be ready to accept his need to feel like a woman? But it wasn’t actually as bad now that he was dead. If anyone gave him crap, he would just devour their heads. The Corpse Bride ended up being a CG film because the actress slated to play the title character… fell on her head…

Tonight I’m lying in bed wearing my coat. Again. Every night when Dad goes out for business he puts me in bed with my coat on so we can run more easily and faster if need be. For years I thought this was pretty damn silly.

But not tonight.

Outside a car just stopped–it doesn’t have its lights switched on. In the moonlight, I see four men stepping out of the car. They’re coming. They’re coming for me.

I close my eyes.

Steps on the stairs.

They’re here now.

The telephone rang, cutting into Ilene’s nightmare. She flipped opened her eyelids. Her breasts heaved. Her pulse throbbed in her ears. She lay face up, staring. Shadows from her dream slinked into the corners of the ceiling as she let the answering machine catch the call.

“Hey, babe, looks like I’ll be late. There’s been some kinda chemical spill. I’m swamped with patients in the ER, but will be home ASAP. And yeah, I promise to finish cleaning the attic no matter how tired I’ll be. Love you.”

Calmed by her husband’s voice, Ilene eased onto her side. She fell asleep soon again.

Quaking thunder woke her hours later. Ilene flipped opened her eyes. Pitch darkness greeted her, and her heartbeat leapt.

She reached for the handle on the nightstand drawer, her fingertips fumbling until tapping against the drawer’s handle. She pulled. Dipped her fingers into the drawer, grabbed the flashlight, and then got out of bed.

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, sudden knocking startled her. She inched toward a window, peeped out. Two sheriff’s deputies waited. She yanked opened the front door.

“Ma’am, I’m Deputy Richards, this is Deputy Sykes. Are you Mrs. Palmer?” Ilene nodded. The deputy continued. “We’re sorry to say, but your husband suffered fatal injuries in an accident. We suspect he was on his way home when he grew ill and lost control of his vehicle…” Richards paused as Ilene began sinking to the floor. He and Sykes caught her by her elbows and led her to the couch.

Sykes sat Ilene’s flashlight upright on the coffee table to illuminate the living room. “Is there anyone you’d like us to call?”

Ilene shook her head, tears dripping off her chin.

Floorboards creaked overhead.

“You’re alone, aren’t you?” Richards asked.

More than ever now that Marvin’s gone. Ilene managed a nod.

“I’ll go check things out, anyway.” Richards flicked on his flashlight, and headed upstairs.

Minutes later, pop pop pop banished the silence.

Ilene’s shoulders jumped along with her heartbeat.

“Stay here,” Sykes yelled, clicking on his flashlight and running upstairs.

Seconds later: pop pop pop pop…

Dense silence followed.

Ilene grabbed her flashlight. She rushed to the kitchen. Slid a butcher’s knife from the wooden block on the counter. She turned to leave and halted when her eyes found the backdoor ajar. “Marvin…,” she whispered, her lips quivering. You’re supposed to be here protecting me! Not dead on a cold slab of steel waiting for me to come claim your body!

She aimed the flashlight upwards to light the walls, and then crept out of the kitchen.

She stood breathless outside the attic room. The door sat ajar, floorboards screeched. Ilene trained the flashlight onto the floor ahead, and pushed past the door.

She gasped at the sight of Richards and Sykes sprawled near each other, their blood pooling. She swung the flashlight up toward the movement on the other side of the attic.

The beam spotlighted Marvin’s reanimated corpse.

Ilene staggered backwards. She stared as Marvin fought to stack cardboard boxes with mangled arms. As he forced his rigor mortis legs to stumble forward.

There’s been some kinda chemical spill… “What happened to you, my love?” Ilene’s voice was hoarse with pain.

Her flashlight’s beam glinted in Marvin’s eyes. He shot toward her in preternatural speed.

Ilene raised the knife. But Marvin was too swift. He snatched the weapon. Then, thrust the thirteen-inch blade into Ilene’s stomach, once, twice, and again.

Ilene sank to the floor, still gripping the flashlight.

Marvin dropped the knife. Turned away, and retreated to the other side of the attic, his steps awkward and off-kilter.

Ilene soon lost her grip on the flashlight. No, not like this, she cried in her thoughts.

Marvin began mumbling, his words thick and slurred, spoken with an undead tongue.

 Ilene struggled to understand him. “I promised…I promised…” she heard, as the darkness of unconsciousness oozed down onto her, and she exhaled her last breath.

–I’m sorry, sir; your child was stillborn–
–Sorry, Mister Blake; your son died in birth–
–Your newborn daughter died in my arms minutes after she was born–
–I’m so sorry, Bill–

She’s a good midwife; she delivers fit and healthy babies.

My friends and I find a place with homemade clam chowder. I buy macaroni and cheese and some kind of shrimp salad. We gather around a table and chat. Perhaps I should buy dessert. Ooh, what an important decision. I laugh to myself that everyday I, everyone, makes these empty choices that will not affect, cannot affect, the rest of the cosmos. There are more important things to consider.

I take a trip to the public restroom and it is empty as a skull. I peer around, wondering why there are no people in here, since the food court is packed. After leaving my mark, I walk over to the mirror, footsteps echoing, the noise from the restaurants not reaching into this cave. Water splashes my face and I look deep into the mirror. Slowly, I wet my long, brown hair, pushing it from my face, when my pulse starts pounding and stomach cramps force me to the floor. I vomit the fishy contents of my stomach onto the tile. I feel the change come on me so suddenly, there is no time to stop it.

I am crouching against the sink when a wrinkled janitor tells me to flush the damn toilet after I use it. I stand up, towering over him, and he screams. My hands move to stop his noise, and crush his throat to a pulp. I pull the body into a stall to feed, hungry after the loss of my lunch, and when I’m done, I slowly gain control of my body. I walk out and blend into the crowd, making my way back to the Clam Bake Hut.