MicroHorror

There was something wrong with their eyes. It wasn’t there at the beginning. It had to have changed at some point, but so slowly that I didn’t spot it until it was too late. We were sitting at the rubber-coated picnic table at the front of the warehouse. The checkout lines behind us were humming along as people bought their five-gallon drums of detergent and thirty-six-packs of printer cartridges, handing the cashier their ID to prove that they had a right to the things they bought.

And as we sat, not talking, I started staring at the massive ceiling. And I saw something up there, farther away than it should have been, almost as if the entire building had been slowly expanding ever since we walked into it. The place had somehow expanded in volume to something like that of a football stadium. I stared up, and far off in the distance, there were now catwalks in the ceiling. Rows of men dressed in identical black business suits were walking up and down, surveying the area below.

I looked back down at the round table we were sitting at. The vast warehouse of shopping had become deserted. We were the only ones there now. Our little table sat alone in that ocean of concrete. A few powerful overhead lights created small pools where we could see. I looked behind me and saw a man peek out from behind a wall. A wall that had not been there a few seconds ago. He moved the drywall aside like a curtain. He saw me spot him and he quickly disappeared. I heard a voice behind the wall chastise him, saying, “What are you doing? He’s not supposed to see us!”

I looked back at my family. They were all sitting completely still, their bodies frozen in mannequin poses. Their mouths had contorted in ridiculous smiles that stretched from ear to ear. The pupils of their eyes had turned into vertical slits like snakes eyes. And they gazed directly at me.

My breathing quickened and I looked back up at the ceiling to see that there was only one man in a suit there now. I could tell, even across the vast distance between us, that he was staring directly at me. I saw him raise his arm in a wide arc and bring it back down with index finger extended, pointing directly at me.

My heart rate tripled and I looked back over my shoulder to see that the wall had moved to within three feet of me. It was shaking and bulging now. A small squid tentacle briefly appeared from underneath before recoiling back under. I turned my head and balled up into the fetal position on my bench. My family’s heads had turned into giant smiling cobra faces. I buried my nose into my knees as adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream.

The wall was making noises. The voice screamed out from behind it, “REMEMBER! HE CAN’T SEE YOU! NOT NOW! NOT EVER!” A chorus of snake rattles and growls and screams rose up from behind the wall. A wet and sticky tentacle slithered up and around my neck and started pulling back and down.

Back and Down.

Maureen’s maid of honor Becky invited all of Maureen’s friends that could make it last minute to the shower. They each brought a present, which they carried downstairs and put in a corner by Maureen’s cage. They went back upstairs, and had a nice buffet lunch of little sandwiches, salad, and a cake from the same bakery that was making the wedding cake. Becky passed around a quiz to everyone, to see who knew Maureen best. Everyone knew the name of the demon Maureen lost the bet to, but almost no one knew that Maureen was on the swim team for a year in high school. Then everyone got to design a wedding dress with toilet paper and tape. They paraded down the basement stairs one at a time. Maureen refused to pick a winner for a while, since she was crying and pleading for someone to let her out of the cage, but eventually she chose Becky’s dress. Becky then handed Maureen’s presents through the bars one by one. Maureen was registered at a medical supply store, so she got lots of gauze, ointment, ice packs and pain relievers. Becky gave a really cute champagne toast, saying how happy she was to be here for Maureen’s big day. There are a lot of weddings based on accidental pregnancies or ticking biological clocks or demonic enslavement, Becky said, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work out to a lot of fun. Everyone got a goodie bag on their way out, with chocolates and jelly beans and a tin of deviled ham.

As usual, Mrs. Denikin’s schoolchildren screamed that Lenin was alive. This was expected. Every year, when her children were marched past the tomb of Russia’s hallowed leader, embalmed under glass, at least one child was disrespectful enough to grab another’s hand and scream. Vladimir Lenin was a great man. His actions had caused millions to die and generations to suffer, but that was because others had twisted Lenin’s teachings. The man himself was still a great figure. Based on this faith, Mrs. Denikin took a busload of children into Moscow each year, and heard the same disrespectful jokes every time. Only this year the children did not seem amused as they said it, but stunned, or even crying. Mrs. Denikin could see Lenin’s body moving, even from ten meters away at the end of the line. Was someone shaking the coffin? The children quickly ran past, none wanting to linger. As she got closer, Mrs. Denikin was horrified to see Lenin’s limbs twitching and his eyelids moving. What a terrible prank! This was a lookalike, it had to be. Mrs. Denikin herded her distraught children and led them out into the chaotic Red Square. The children began screaming even louder. Mrs. Denikin hushed them, until the screams from the Square made her notice exactly why Red Square was chaotic. The Square was filling with the dead. Naked bodies from a morgue were staggering from the left. Dead soldiers marched in formation on the right. Rotting corpses were crawling with whatever strength their remaining meat could give them. They were all coalescing around the tomb. Mrs. Denikin felt a hand on her shoulder, a cold one that smelled of formaldehyde. Mrs. Denikin hoped she was right about Lenin.

Today your friend will be run over by a truck. You’ll think it tragic, and a waste of life, and random. It is not random. Last year, exactly one year ago today, your uncle died from a medication allergy. They said it was an accident. It was not an accident. It was not random. It was me. Have you recognized the pattern yet? Every year, on exactly this day, someone you love dies. Exactly this day. Do you remember what you did on this exact day 17 years ago? Do you remember pushing me onto those train tracks? Was high school that long ago? I get to watch you now. I know you never speak about me. Not to anyone: your shrink, your wife, your mistress. I don’t know your thoughts, so I don’t know if you ever think about me. But once a year, I get to communicate with you. And I know you’ve noticed the method I do so, if not the message. Maybe this year you’ll understand it. I’m not asking for much. Just two little words. “I’m sorry.” Just that. I don’t expect to hear it tonight. Why should this night be any different? I’ll stay here, watching you, day after day, night after night, waiting. If another year goes by without those two little words, then you’ll get another message from me next year. And I’ll have to decide who you love more, your wife or your mistress.

“This will just be a small vacation, Esteban,” the man with the beard said. “You have nothing to fear. After this, you will reunite with your parents.” Esteban knew they were kidnappers; his parents had money. They acted mean, but mostly to each other. They didn’t hurt Esteban. They took the blindfold off, put him in a small room with a bed and TV, and brought him McDonald’s every day for food. There was a man at the door all day and all night. They didn’t let him outside. He didn’t have to go to school. He just watched TV all day and all night, eating McDonald’s. The man at the door sometimes watched it with Esteban, all the violent stuff he wanted, but didn’t let him watch the news. Esteban wondered if he was on the news. Was his mom crying because of this? He wanted to tell her that he was okay, but the man at the door wouldn’t let him make a phone call. Esteban missed his parents, more than he thought he would. He wanted this whole thing to be over, to be back with them. Esteban waited in the room for four days, tired of TV and McDonald’s. He listened for police sirens. He never heard any. On the fifth day the man with the beard came back in. He didn’t look happy. “Esteban, things have not gone well. Your parents were… not cooperative with us.” Esteban asked if this mean he had to stay longer. “No. I said you will reunite with your parents.” He paused, took a deep breath, and took a gun from his pocket. “And you will.”

The vice principal heard the fire alarm, and ran to get his clay pot. The middle school students shouted in delight, spilled out into the hallway, and filed down the fire stairs. The vice principal ran to the boy’s gym, where a gym teacher was confronting what had once been a student. Like all secure middle schools, gym teachers forced the students to take showers. They watched for boiling runoff water. Today, one of them saw it. The gym teacher pulled the fire alarm, and hurried the uninfected kids safely outside. He then tried to tackle the steaming kid, but the kid had begun sprouting flame. Fire ran down his back, edging down his limbs. Smoke leaked form his mouth and other orifices. The vice principal saw the scene, turned on all the showers, and aimed them best he could toward the burning kid. The kid retreated in a corner, hissing. The vice principal held the clay pot to the kid’s hissing mouth, and began reciting the Latin spell. The hissing and smoke grew more pronounced. By the end the vice principal could barely breathe to say the words. But he finished the spell. The boy screamed one last time, and the spirit was forced into the clay pot. The vice principal filled the pot with water and slammed a wide cork on it. Crisis over. The kid was dead, but he had been dead as soon as the spirit first sunk its teeth in. Why did they always go for children? The school would be notified that this student had moved out of the area. The vice principal walked back to his office, the filled pot growing colder in his hands. At least this wasn’t a public burden to bear: the students still thought these were false alarms.

Father Rollo had all the crosses removed from his church in Asunción, and drained all the holy water. He wanted to help they who needed him most, and they who needed him most were burned by these items. This did not mean that they could not be good Catholics, just that it would be more difficult. The other priests in Asunción thought he was risking his life. Father Rollo agreed; but this was his calling. The first midnight mass only brought one soul, a scared unshaven man. Father Rollo performed the entire mass in the bare church just for him, preaching a homily about resisting the body’s temptations. He gave the man the body of Christ, and then the blood of Christ. The body of Christ was just a wafer, but the blood of Christ was not wine but real human blood. A like-minded nun had donated it. The one man left, spiritually and physically nourished, able to go about his life without succumbing to sin. He came back the next night, and brought a friend. The next night there were five of them. Father Rollo has to ask the entire convent to start donating blood. Within a month there were hundreds attending the bare-walled church. The papers wrote about the miraculous drop in Asunción’s crime rate. Father Rollo was overjoyed at the success of his program–yet he prayed he never ran short of blood.

Myra loved scary movies: loved giving a good primal scream while knowing that she was safely in her movie theater. This scary movie was about another young woman, Missy, watching a scary movie. Missy was throwing popcorn into her mouth (which was ridiculous, because no one that looks like that eats at all, much less eats like a pig) and watching a third young woman walking through a creepy auditorium. In the film-within-a-film the actress is looking for her boyfriend, but there’s a ghost who possesses people on the loose. When you’re possessed your face gets all melty. The actress sees her boyfriend’s jacket, and she taps him on the shoulder, and wouldn’t you know it when the camera pulls back he’s a meltyface ghost. Missy watching was scared, but Myra watching Missy wasn’t. Then Missy tuned to say something to her boyfriend–and in a scarier pullback her boyfriend was all meltyface too! That got Myra’s heart going: the possessing ghost could come through the film, jump out of the picture. She screamed, and turned to exchange bug-eyed fright faces with her friend Janet: that was a horrifying idea, that evil spirits could leave the screen and take over your friends. Myra’s throat clenched when she saw what was left of Janet’s face. Her eye was on her cheek, and her mouth was down in the skin of her neck. A streak of scalp made a curved path down to the nose, and the other eye had migrated to the center of the forehead. Myra tried to scream, tried to run, but the thing inside her friend pulled her back.

Rubbing her eyes and yawning, Gracie asked to hear Goodnight Moon before bedtime. Portia agreed, holding back her tears, keeping their last moments innocent. “In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon,” she began, looking around their green hexcube. The war on earth was going badly. The expense of sending bottled water up to the colonies wasn’t considered worth it. Seven thousand lives weren’t worth the yearly billion in fuel costs alone. Not when that money could be spent on fuel for our own weapons and troop transports. “Think global” became an isolationist phrase. Portia and Gracie lost the lottery to be on the last shuttle out. Now they were hazy from lack of oxygen, but Gracie thought it was sleepiness. “Goodnight moon,” she read. “Goodnight light and the red balloon. Goodnight bears, goodnight chairs. Goodnight kittens, and goodnight mittens.” Gracie was asleep. Down the corridor, Portia heard the crumbled crack of the airlock detonation. She held Gracie close, and blacked out before feeling any pain. The book’s last pages breezed open on the wind of the last air escaping. “Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere.”

The gamekeepers at the Staten Island Zoo had a problem with Staten Island Chuck. He was their weather-prognosticating groundhog. Since animals knew when an earthquake or thunderstorm was approaching, maybe they really could predict the end of winter. Chuck growled whenever approached, and frequently charged his pot roast of a body forward to bite handlers. The zookeepers knew that Chuck was not ready to make the official pronouncement–which they decided by a flip of the coin beforehand. And there were no shortage of woodchucks in the tri-state area. So Chuck was euthanized, and a new woodchuck was adopted in the weeks before the big day and named Chuck. But this groundhog seemed to have the same wild nature. Odd, for an animal that lives in backyards full of cats and squirrels. It was affecting the other zoo animals as well. They were on edge, acting as if a nor’easter was coming. But there was nothing but drizzly clouds in the forecast. During the official prognostication event, the new Chuck was uncooperative, snarling at handlers and biting everyone. When the man at the microphone started announce that spring would be early, he stammered and halted and finally had to drop Chuck. The feral animal scurried through the startled crowd, before being cornered and stuffed into a bag. “I… I just can’t lie,” the announcer said to the crowd. “Spring isn’t coming.” “Six more weeks?” one reporter queried. “No, way more than six more weeks. Spring isn’t coming. Period. The… the animals know.” Throughout the day, reports from Punxatawny Phil in Punxatawny, PA; General Beauregard Lee in Liburn, GA, and Buckeye Chuck in Marion, OH all confirmed misbehaving groundhogs. All the handlers wept, and confessed the direness of the groundhog’s true forecast. After years of truly believing groundhogs saw their shadows, few people believed their warnings now. Then, the snows began.