MicroHorror

Dreams, they say, are portals to our inner thoughts.
She stood over the body of her friend,
her breathing quickening with every drop of blood.
Gashes and lacerations painted her friend’s body,
resembling a surgical mishap.
“Kerry,” she whispered through hushed cries,
clutching the blade still.
Kerry lifelessly lay on the bed,
Such a sweet girl lying there ruined.
She knelt down, holding her friend, screaming.
Kerry’s eyes flickered open and she felt
the very knife pierce her neck.
The screams of the fantasy world echoed out in reality;
she sat up and saw Kerry sleeping happily.
Bizarre dreams of malevolence, or were they desires?

“What’s the difference between a dead baby and a bowl of ramen noodles?” asked Norm.

Jesus shrugged.

“It’s a little weird to cum in a bowl of ramen noodles,” said Norm.

“Yeah. I guess,” replied Jesus apathetically.

Norm laughed hysterically at his own joke and its poor reception.

“What’s so funny?” asked Jesus.

“Cumming in dead babies,” said Norm.

“What’s funny about that? I do it all the time…”

Jesus looked offended. He wasn’t kidding.

Norm rarely spoke to Jesus after that day.

He fizzes with words of visible red, upon his hands and knees; his spine ripples to an unseen wave, and all the time his neck rent weeps, and I wonder if it’s possible for one body part to be so sad? On the screen in the box next to his body my brother talks to me. “You think it’s a game?” And I say no, but the me in the box just giggles.

“You think this is a fucking game, get that shit out of my face,” and the picture is swatted like a fly.

“It’s all a game, man,” I had once said, poking the camera into my brother’s face. “Now smile, come on, show the world your gleaming white.”

A box in a box, like holding a mirror up to a mirror I can only sit and prostitute out my eyes to gore and guilt, I’m frozen, as is the bile in my mouth.

He gargles, then whistles, then rasps as the lacerated flesh submits to the pressure from inside, like air forced out of the opening to a balloon. Face down in a pool of blood that looks too dark to be blood, it clings to his skin like melted wax.

From beyond the grave but caged in plastic and glass he still speaks to me. “You want a laugh? Well, go on and laugh, failed again, did I? Expected it, didn’t you?”

The me on the little screen twists and twirls round his frame and converts the scene into a horror carnival, laughing maniacally as the fool circumnavigates the grim death, like the moon would the earth.

“Sure I’ll laugh, why shouldn’t I?” I had once said. “Why shouldn’t you, too, throw it away, throw it all aside.”

“This is my life!”

“Hey, Billy, play, Billy! Come on, sing along!” Drunk giddy and near exhaustion from the revelry I fall to the floor, with lungs afire with folly, even my cheekbones ache. I hold the camcorder in my hand, focusing on my brother’s face.

I have yet to move even though the blood creeps up to stain the sole of my shoe.

“I’m making a film, Billy, it’s about you, you’re the star, make love to the lens, baby!”

“No job, no prospects for the future, no love and no life.”

“Brilliant, give me more, give me more!”

He gave the final act to the air, the final act so fresh and light with its steely glint. So sharp it made short shrift of the opposing skin and so his jugular shot a fountain over the camera lens; instinctively I wipe away the liquid and zoom into the wound, something for the morbid angels.

I continue to tape for a while longer, finding drama in the thrashing, although I had no choice, as my hands would not move. I caught his life! I hold his soul inside this box with green blinking eyes; with the life of this camera I have captured death. It lives with whirs and odd plastic clicks as I rewind the tape and think of how I can bring him back by pressing just one button. I can do it with play and rewind, play and rewind; I can bring him back and shake the death tagged over to me. Maybe tell him I love him, maybe that’ll make a difference.

I pull out the digital flat screen on my camera and I press to stop recording. Then I rewind and then press play.

“We only have one vacancy, but we don’t rent that room out,” the manager, Ted Westwood, said, reading the logs. “You are going have to try somewhere else; sorry.”

“Let’s see if we can work this out,” Peter said, pulling out a wallet. “My wife is very tired.”

“No, I won’t be–” he stopped, seeing the amount of money he was being offered: three times the room’s price.

“So can we stay in that room?” he asked, knowing the answer. “Please get someone to help with her bags.”

“One of you help them with their bags,” the manager said to the bellboys. “Enjoy your stay here at Sunrise Hotel.”

After the exchange of money, they got the keys to the Lovers’ Suite. It had been named that, but was now called Lovers’ End Suite. The room was no longer rented out to anyone and most workers avoided it out of fear. The bellhop left them as soon as he opened the door and switched on the light in the room.

Peter and his wife, Leslie, inspected the room and found it quite attractive. It had the regal decorations of all the other rooms, but it looked aged and covered over with dust. They didn’t bother undressing, being too tired, and got into the bed to fall asleep.

Peter woke when he felt his wife climb out of bed, after the first few hours of the night. She’s going to the restroom, he thought to himself, and dozed off again, listening to the humming air conditioner fill the room with refreshing cold air.

He woke up once again, this time not being able to breathe. His wife was on top of him, strangling him. He tried to push his petite wife off, but she felt oddly twice her weight, and she started punching his face. His nose crushed and his eyes swollen shut, his body gave one last spasm and he was dead.

Leslie snapped out of her trance, confused and dazed, and saw that she had blood on her hands. Peter’s blood. She started to piece it together, and realized her husband was dead and she had killed him with her bare hands. She ran to the restroom, yelling like a banshee, where she broke the glass mirror and slit her wrists. The other hotel patrons did not hear any of this, and did not find out till the next day.

“Same as the last time, the other young couple, both dead,” the investigator told Ted. “Just different circumstances.”

The police investigator ruled the death as a murder-suicide, but Ted Westwood knew what it really was: the spirit of the Lovers’ Suite. It was where an ex-wife, over forty years ago, killed both her former husband and the new woman he was seeing. He had come to the hotel with his new fiancée as a vacation before their marriage, and the ex-wife found them and shot the husband in the stomach, the fiancée in the face, and herself in the temple. The room, when rented to two lovers now, always ended in their deaths–one murdered the other and then committed suicide. This is how the room became known as “Lovers’ End Suite.”

“Where have you been!? I’ve been trying to call! Are you all right?” Anne had been crying. James could always tell when she’d been crying. Her voice rose an octave and wavered.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, how are you?” He tried to sound calm.

“I’m fine… Have you seen what’s going on downtown? It’s all over the TV!”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. We heard the fire alarm go off in the stairwell and then this bloody woman shows up and… I’d have to say in my professional opinion that we have zombies or something very much like them running around.” As he said this, James stepped into the conference room with the giant, corner window on the 26th floor and looked out over downtown.

The sirens could be heard through the three-inch glass. Smoke rose from various spots and he could see complete bedlam below. Cars clogged the streets as far as he could see and people were running in every direction. He saw a woman tackled from two directions and could even see the spray of blood as she was devoured by four attackers. Another man was pulled through the window of his car and the assailant chewed through his throat, severing the head. His attacker fell back and two more dove upon the body.

“They aren’t saying what the hell it is but from the footage I’ve seen, I believe it! Is there any way you can get home? What are you going to do!? I’m so fucking scared!” Anne began crying again and James had to snap her out of it.

“ANNE! Listen to me! Don’t worry about me right now. I’ll have to think of something but right now I need you to do some things, okay!?” She muffled a reply. “Okay!?”

“All right, I will.”

“Okay, first of all, get the guns from the closet and the bullets from the top shelf. Put the safeties on and load them both! Cock them both. ”

“Okay, I can do that.” She sniffed and listened.

“Okay, then go in the basement and get those old doors and bring them up, then just jam them between the radiators and the front windows for now.”

“Okay.” She was beginning to sound better.

“All right, finally, have you heard sirens in the neighborhood?”

“No, I don’t think so, not for a while. I heard some about an hour ago, but since then I’ve just heard cars driving by really fast.”

“Okay, get the axe, and carefully try to take out the main struts for the front steps. Just hack the crap out of them as quickly as you can, then stay inside and try not to make any noise. Keep and eye out and if you see anyone running towards you, just get inside and bolt the door! Make sure the TV is off, go in the bedroom if you want, but try to stay out of the living room and front office. Okay?”

“Okay, I get it. Just try to hurry home if you can. But if you can’t, just… stay safe?” She began crying again. “I’m soooo scared for you!”

“I’ll be okay, sweetie; just do what I said and I’ll try to get home. My battery is almost dead so I’ll only call if I have to or when I get home, okay!?”

“Okay, I love you!”

“I love you too, baby! Be safe.” He imagined the 26 floors that separated him from the ground. Then he imagined the 65 zombie-infested blocks he’d have to traverse. Now he just had to convince himself he really would be okay.

She had known that her father would die on the night of the summer festival. He was a coalminer in the small Japanese village of Kitamatsu on the southern island of Kyushu. She was one of the teenage girls who wore bright blue kimonos and struggled along the muddy pavements in their wooden sandals with the rest of the procession. The air was smoky and damp, loaded with the smells of grilled fish. Through the streets of the village the men carried a huge painted plaster dragon, mounted on a wooden palette, on their shoulders. After the rain started, the kimonos with their red sashes became wetter and more revealing and the girls danced more keenly to the cacophony of beating drums and clanging bells.

Even as she danced there was a tiny needle of light in her mind that told her there would be trouble. Once the procession finished she said to her father that she wanted him to take her home. He wouldn’t listen and kept drinking beer in the village square with the rest of the men. Their songs got louder and cruder. Then she saw him with the shiny red eye of the dragon in his hands. Her father was a poor man and the eye could be sold for at least a month’s wages. Then he was down in the mud and she could see them kicking, kicking him again and again until the eye slipped from his hands. No-one could hear her when she screamed at them to stop. He never got up.

Ten years later, in 1937, Japanese soldiers invaded China and occupied the city of Shanghai. She was still living in Kitamatsu with her elderly mother when they seized her. She was taken to stop the Japanese soldiers raping their way indiscriminately across the eastern Chinese seaboard, which would have inflamed local resistance to the occupation. They wanted her to control China. With her one body she held the Chinese at bay for her masters.

The kimono she wore now was gray and faded. As she was raped every day, ten times a day or even more, sometimes by two at once, she began to concentrate on the tiny tunnel of light that still existed in her mind. The needle-eye which had whispered to her that her father would die, which had soundlessly intimated the following year that her brother would come home from school camp in the mountains with a broken arm.

The needle’s eye became a little wider and seemed to become a tunnel that was inviting to enter. Each day with the brutes inside her she would crawl a little further along the tunnel. One day the tunnel got wider and she was able to stand up. It felt solid under her feet. She looked down and she could see the brutes down there, one between her legs and one at her ass and she suddenly felt that they were fucking a corpse. She could also see outside the hut, the slack-jawed soldiers smoking and waiting their turn. The tunnel opened out endlessly before her. She stepped forward into the light and was gone.

Jared ran hard, at a pace that normally he could not have kept up for this long, but it was after him. He felt himself slipping as his foot pounded into the gravel of the driveway he was running on. He had already emptied the cartridge of his Smith & Wesson handgun on the werewolf. The werewolf just pulled the bullets out as if they inflicted no pain on him. It even gave Jared a devious grin showing its dagger length, razor sharp teeth as it pulled out the bullets. The six bullet holes then sealed themselves before the werewolf started chasing him. He was trying to run to the safety of the chapel that was just over the cement wall that enclosed the house he was running from. The cement wall, with its decorative cement gargoyle statues, was so close Jared could reach out and touch it.

The werewolf gave what sounded like a low rumbling roar that resonated deep inside of Jared. The sound made Jared wish this was all just an extremely vicious nightmare and he’d wake up in the safety of his bedroom, lying in his bed snug under his warm blankets. Jared didn’t let the sound stop him, though; he had made it to the cement wall and then he looked up. He couldn’t believe what he saw.

The gargoyles, which had been made of stone, were flaking it off revealing their leathery bodies which were covered with pulsating cankerous sores. Their eyes all seemed to illuminate with a black glow, like looking into the pits of Hell. They opened their mouths and started to roar ferocious roars back to the werewolf, sounding like a pack of enraged bull elephants. Jared put his arms on the wall to cross over it, and tried scrambling over it. One of the gargoyles wrapped its talons around Jared’s forearms. Jared tried unsuccessfully to free his arm. The gargoyle had what felt like a vice grip, digging its talons into his veins. The gargoyle cackled like a hyena in Jared’s face, spraying bubbling spit everywhere. Jared inhaled a sulfurous acidic breath that made his stomach turn. He felt himself flying threw the air back towards the werewolf. The gargoyle had thrown him.

The creature with the matted, black, coarse fur ripped its jaws into the jugular of Jared, who was yelling for help, but the yells had ended in a gurgling sound as the blood seeped from his opened mouth, which was frozen in a look of terror. The gargoyles watched with excitement, and jumped with eagerness, their boar-like snouts dripping with yellowish
foamy drool, and each time the blood spilled the gargoyles were tempted to jump from the wall. They knew they had to wait till their master finished eating. The werewolf had torn off the pieces of what had been Jared and was now only a carcass of meat and blood. When the werewolf slinked away, the gargoyles jumped down, fighting for a piece of meat like crazed vultures.

Since I found my life coach, I’ve stopped sniffing amyl nitrate and, lately, raping teenage girls.
The coach taught me tai-chi and how to go with the flow. I keep a clear head and set myself mid-term goals. So: no more Surprise! sex. Committed to the consensual, I regale young ladies, stroke them, invite them out for sushi.

Applause, cheers, and whistles. “We have come to the highlight of the show!” Ta-dah! Lights reveal the Black Box. Applause and cheers. “Who would like to get sawed in half tonight? I need a volunteer. Uhmm… let’s see, ah, yes, you there. The lady in purple from the sixth row, please come to the stage!”

As she slowly walked to the center of the stage, her life flashed before her drowning eyes. Many thoughts rented space in her mind. Maybe he’s a mind reader too, she thought. Maybe he could see the neon sign painted in her mind that had been screaming… silently. A mind that screams “I can’t take it anymore” Yeah, abracafuckindabra… is how she felt, when she stood on stage, and it felt no different in her everyday life. Mary thought to herself that she would rather be in Hell.

Back to the show…

“Please lie down in the box and relax!” The Magician spun the Black Box very slowly to show the audience all sides of the box. She hummed a Beethoven sonata. He positioned the box just so, pulled out a large, shiny, electric double-toothed saw, and turned it on.

As the Magician leaned down to begin the illusion of dissection, Mary started screaming hysterically. Unbeknownst to the audience, Mary saw the face of death. A flash of his head bore the semblance of what appeared to be a grotesque and cadaverous being. At that moment, he had no eyes and a stench of flesh in its last stages of decay. The audience went wild, as they loved the show. The Magician whispered to Mary, “Welcome to Hell, Mary.” The intensity of the cheers from the audience pumped through the Magician’s veins like molten magma.

The Magician got caught up in the cheers, turned off the saw, raised his arms, and gloried in his fame. Mary broke free from the Black Box and ran half-crazed off the stage. The Magician yelled for her, and then he noticed a man in the last row holding a sign that said “Charles, rest in peace.” The Magician slowly lowered his arms, and just stared at the man. Someone from the audience yelled out, “What the fuck is going on here?” Mary was no longer in sight as she ran out of from the show and managed to get a taxi home.

The scientist answered by saying that the Magician before the audience was Charles Morris, who died one hundred years ago. “His soul was never laid to rest and he came to me. While living, Charles had a disease that severely disfigured and malformed his head. Adults and children alike called him a freak while frightened of him. With a broken spirit, he turned to killing, and set out to mutilate anyone and everyone who made fun of him, and turned their cheek. He loved the thrill of severing the cords and sawing off the heads of people who made fun of his…with a chainsaw. He begged me to give him life again. In return he promised never to kill again.” There was complete silence from the audience and the silent Magician began a new page in his diary.

The next day, still shaken from her ordeal, Mary made her morning tea, and turned on the telly.

“We have incredible breaking news! A bloody massacre occurred last night at the Magic Show in downtown London! This was the site of the most hideous and horrific massacre in London’s history! There appear to be no survivors, and all who attended last night were decapitated!”

Mary dropped her tea and as it shattered to the ground she shrieked in horror. She sat down to try to compose herself enough to call the police. Her screams were silenced as her head tumbled in her lap.

Neil stopped halfway between the gravesite and the car, hands on his knees, wheezing. His breath clouded the crisp night air. Gotta cut down on smoking, he thought. After a few seconds he straightened, and that’s when he saw it: a thin beam of light sweeping the cemetery. Flashlight. Night watchman. Shit. He gauged the distance of the watchman, trying to decide what to do with the body–leave it where it lay, or drag it with him. He knew that if he didn’t do this, he would soon be in a cold sweat, shaking, doubled over, puking. It had happened before. The flashlight was getting closer. Fuck it. He grabbed the cold ankles again, moving as fast as he could. It was like trying to run in waist-high water.

By the time he made it to the Suburban, his thighs were screaming. He opened the back door and heaved the lifeless body inside. He nudged the door with his hip until he heard it latch–snick–then ran around to the driver’s door. Hands slick with mud, he fumbled for his keys and jumped in. He found the keyhole easily in the dark–a practiced routine–and fired up the engine. There was no point in being quiet now. He punched the gas pedal and the tires chirped.

A few minutes later he was on the freeway. The adrenaline was still going, blood thundering in his ears. He forced himself to keep the vehicle under the speed limit, kept checking the rear-view mirror for flashing blue lights. Then he remembered the shovel. Fingerprints. Dammit! He pounded the steering wheel with his palm.

He took a few deep breaths, trying to calm himself. The stench was awful. Even when there wasn’t a body in the back, the Suburban smelled of formaldehyde and rotting meat. He rubbed eucalyptus balm under his nose and lit a cigarette.

This wasn’t the life he’d imagined for himself. By now, he should be a doctor-in-residence with a fat paycheck and a posh downtown loft–but in his sophomore year he’d met the White Nurse, and fell hard. He dropped out of college, moved back in with his parents, got kicked out. Now he was just another junkie loser, twenty-seven years old, broke, trying to make a buck any way he could.

He took the James Street exit and found his way to the alley behind the shops. His nerves were a little less jangly now. He would score soon. It was three o’clock in the morning and everything was closed. This was a new customer and he’d never been there in the dark, so he cruised slowly through the alley, reading the signs on the metal doors. He found it, fifth door down: Living Ink Tattoo School.