MicroHorror

Everyone in the courtroom glared at the rapist sitting in the witness stand.

The victim, Sandra Jessil, sat by her lawyer, her blonde hair lynched tight in a painful bun, one hand holding a pen like a dagger, her other hand ready to grab the shard of plastic PVC pipe she had carved into a knife and taped to her leg. I’ll make you pay, she knew. I’ll cut and slash you until you’re striped as a tiger. You’ll pay, my dear ex-lover, pay dearly.

Her brother Todd stared at the accused too, pulling one curly hair after another out of his scalp. He scratched his teeth together, kept a hand inside his jacket, stroking the razor he had smuggled in with a hefty bribe. You’ll pay, you bastard, he knew. I’ll make your whole neck smile and give you a blood-beard, one as big as a lion’s mane. If you could scream with a slit throat, you’d die screaming. Bastard. You–will–die.

And a police officer named Mark Knik–the same cop who’d arrested the rapist without using unnecessary violence like he’d wanted to–was also watching him while drumming on his Beretta 9mm with his fingers. I might just kill you, he knew. I should have done it when I caught you, but now is okay. But I won’t be quick about it. I’ll shoot an arm and let you run… then shoot a shoulder and let you run, then shoot your gut and let you run. I’ll play with you until you’ve got so many blood spots you look like a leopard–then I’ll stamp one last spot on your forehead. Die screaming, motherfu–

The rapist’s lawyer cleared his throat so loud the sound echoed. Then he got up and walked to the stand. The judge’s bored eyes followed him, and he scratched the side of his nose, scratched his throat.

Sandra thought of her plastic blade

Her brother Todd kept stroking the razor.

The cop named Mark drummed his fingertips on his pistol.

Then the lawyer started talking to the rapist. “Were you with this woman Sandra on the night of the alleged rape?”

“No,” the accused responded. “She lied to the police.”

“Does she often lie to people?” the lawyer asked.

“All the time,” the accused told him. “Last year she lied to her doctor about her alcohol history.”

Sandra’s lawyer stood up, snapped: “Objection. That’s not–”

“RRRRREEEEOOOOOWWWWWW!!!”

The yowl interrupted the lawyer, interrupted everybody. The rapist covered his ears for a moment… and then he had to shield himself. But he couldn’t stop the attacker descending upon him. The crowbar broke two ribs, an arm, a collarbone, pushing the rapist off the witness stand. The hits rained down for an entire minute. Nobody spoke. Bone cracked. Blood splattered and dripped, drumming with the impact of each drop. A puddle widened.

The attacker let up, and still no one spoke. Sandra and Todd and Mark stared silently, their mouths as wide as their eyes.

Only the judge’s breathing rasped through the silence. Blood dripped, falling from his glistening robe, his sweat-shined face. He dropped the crowbar and it lay there like a panther leg. The judge bent over the body, setting his palms on the floor, curving his fingers into claws. He told the corpse: “You–make–me–sick!”

And he hissed, loud and long, then licked at the blood.

The objection was apparently sustained.

Slav dropped from the tree and landed inside the walled garden. No dogs came.

The house windows were dark but he noticed a movement outside. A figure crossed the broad terrace and descended the steps to the garden. It was a girl wearing a black cloak. She felt her way with a stick like a blind person and carried something that glinted. Slav smiled, slipped his hand into his pocket and stroked the knife, ran his thumb up the blade. He ducked through the shadows after her.

He followed her to an arbor of holly trees out of sight from the house. He was surprised by a second figure, but quickly realized that it was only a statue, a bearded man holding a giant bone club. Slav stroked his jaw and tensed as the girl dropped the cloak. She was naked; her body glimmered pale in the moonlight.

She raised a silver flute to her lips, and swayed as she began to play. He couldn’t hear it of course, deaf from birth, but he worried others might hear. He glanced about, wondered who had draped garlands of flowers over the statue and set a brazier burning charcoal and sprigs of myrtle. Would the music bring people?

Something was happening to him. He felt strange, perhaps there were some other herbs being burnt on the fire? He thought he could hear for the first time in his life, the sound of wild music. The grass writhed beneath his feet, the shadowy branches reached for him with spiky arms. He could feel himself hardening.

Slav shook himself and grinned. This was weird shit. Some blind bitch getting horny with a statue at midnight. She was hot, though. He pulled out the knife. He’d have to get close quick, let her feel the blade at her throat before she screamed.

She didn’t scream as his hand clamped her mouth shut, as the point of his knife pricked her throat, as the steel released a bead of blood.

He liked the feel of her warm body pressed against him. He whispered in her ear, telling her what he was going to do.

Slav winced as a marble hand took the knife from his hand and bent his arm. It snapped. He screamed and dropped to the ground. He saw the statue holding the naked girl. She smiled, groped blindly for his face then kissed the stone lips. Hercules didn’t even look at Slav, simply raised his club.

It was the last thing Slav saw.

The bluebottle landed on Sue’s eye and took a few steps. Sue didn’t move. Not surprising really, considering how hard Sid had hit her. It did seem odd, that fat juicy bluebottle wandering round her blank staring eye.

It was then that he had the idea. Didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it earlier, an absolutely brilliant idea, if it worked.

Later, when he returned to the abandoned foundry, Sid brought with him his purchases. First he twisted the lid off a jar and poured thin honey into her slack mouth. That seemed to work for a while but then it ponded and oozed down her cheeks. Then he opened the bait tin and poured the wriggling maggots over her head. Well, the ones that fell into the mouth came to a pretty sticky end. But what was brilliant was the way the rest quickly burrowed away out of sight, up her nose, into her ears and, well, they just disappeared really quick.

As he left, locking the rusty old iron door behind him, he decided to give it a few days before he visited again.

Sid’s battered Ford bounced down the pot-holed road leading back to Bennett’s Foundry, as was. It had been five days and people had been asking nosy questions. “Where’s your Sue?” they’d ask. “Such a lively, outgoing person, not like her to keep herself to herself!” Too bloody right, he thought. And he caught her right in the middle of putting herself about with him next door, which was when he topped her. Well, the next morning to be honest. There was a good program about fishing that evening.

The door squealed like a stuck pig. He tried lifting it to stop it dragging but it didn’t help any. Didn’t remember it being that noisy when he came here a week ago with the body.

The smell was terrible. He hoped to God there were no dogs downwind of this place.
There had been.

Sid rescued what bits he could and kicked them together in the middle of the dusty floor.

That night, when it had happened, she’d said it had been a mistake to marry him, him and his bloody fishing. She loved people, clubbing and the hurly-burly of city life. She said she was going to leave him, she’d had enough, they were living separate lives anyway.

Sid wrapped the scarf tightly round his mouth and pulled the tarpaulin off of her. The air erupted with a cloud of angry bluebottles. One landed on his hand and he squashed it.

A lot of her had gone but what flesh was left was rinded with fresh fly eggs. A wasp had woven its papery nest in her empty eye socket. A good place to mine the honey-filled tunnel below.

Sid walked round her, excited, watching the way the maggots squirmed beneath her skin, fascinated by the hurly-burly of a million maggots. And then, he started to plan his next fishing trip. He might even get a wasp larva or two, for extra bait, a real bonus.

He stood there, unwavering.

When the rain began, he did not falter. His clothes and hair became soaked, but he hardly noticed. It probably would eventually lead to the onset of a cold, but that wasn’t an important thing at all. At this point, hardly anything mattered to him. There was only one thing on his mind.

Patience was a virtue he luckily possessed, because the wait seemed to last forever. The rain ceased, then started again. Thunder cracked around him, but the noise never made him jump.

Finally, the door to the house he had been staring at opened.

He could have rushed after him, but chose not to. It was better to make him come to him.

And rather foolishly, the man did just that.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment a long time,” he said to the man before connecting with a right hand that sent him onto the muddy lawn below.

The look of fear in the man’s eyes told him the lesson to not mess with his wife had been learned.

And yet he still didn’t relent.

She was in her bed, but she had not slept a single wink. That’s because she kept hearing the noises. And the more they continued, the more terrified she became.

The first time she heard the sound of the floor creaking downstairs she tried to convince herself it was her imagination. But it just kept going to the point that the sound was completely undeniable.

And then there were the other noises. Things had been falling in the last few minutes, and her not knowing just what any of it was made her condition even worse. More than ever, she wished Roger wasn’t away on that business trip. If he were here, he would take care of whatever was down there.

But there was no time left to think of any of that. No matter how scared she was, she knew she’d have to take care of business herself.

Thankfully, there was at least Roger’s gun to protect her. She leaned over onto the nightstand and held it firmly in her hand.

It was now or never.

With her hands trembling, she kept the gun pointed in front of her as she walked down the steps. The sounds of the floor creaking continued, along with something else.

Footsteps. And they were coming in her direction.

She was halfway down the steps when the footsteps stopped. The outline of whatever was down there was clear to her.

She fired one shot.

The figure disappeared to the floor in a heap. When several minutes passed without any movement, she finally got the nerve to turn a light on and see the thing face to face.

It was Roger.

The moon cut through the darkness with its milky shaft of light. Lewis strained his eyes into the glow as this was his only point of consolation. The large beech tree scraped against the window with twisted branches luring him to look, but Lewis was too afraid. His youthful mind taunted him with the notion that it was under the bed. Every muscle in his body twitched with anticipation from the imminent manifestation of the bogeyman to slide from below and to grab him down to the cavern of hell where it dwelled. Turning his eyes to the window, the tree had finally won. Lewis focused his weary eyes onto the gnarled branches that rhythmically and relentlessly scratched the glass surface. Dark silhouettes of beguiling arms reached out beseeching Lewis to not look under the bed.

“Stay with us…” The wind and branches whispered to him with hypnotic tones, caressing him away from looking below. The wind sneaked through the tiny open window with a pleading crescendo embracing Lewis, securing him with its soothing breath.

“Shh!” Lewis abruptly retorted as the sound became amplified inside his cluttered head. Reluctantly his mind began to wander. He recalled the moment the pencil ground into the soft vulnerable flesh, the pale neck vomiting claret fluid with a pair of pleading eyes bulging with intense incredulity. A quiver of a lip, a fruitless lift of a wavering arm and it was all over. So quick, so final. No child should see such a pitiful death.

Though Lewis was fourteen years of age, he still yearned for a comforting hand to stroke his clammy brow. It never came. Only the bogeyman continued to terrify him, just as it did when he was of a much more tender age.

Rancid emaciated hands would slowly secrete and slither from under the valance, a rusty substance oozing from behind the sharpened fingernails as they wormed their spindly bony arms around Lewis’s panting and heaving body, crushing eventually his neck until he no longer had the breath to scream, or even to weep. Lewis would wake within the damp moist sheets, perspiration budding from under his hairline, his body throbbing with panic nevertheless relieved it was only a nightmare. His brother in the next bed often brought him back to reality with his irritable “What the hell, Lewis, shut the fuck up!” bawl. However every night the thought of the bogeyman plagued him, teasing and testing his conscious and subconscious mind.

But at this moment it was paramount. As of tonight the unremitting hellish visions were about to reach their final climax. A conclusion. Struggling against his will to look under the bed and that of the comfort he gained from the tree with its lullaby of calm, Lewis eventually managed to force his ridged body with laboured exertion to look down. Curiosity peaked to a point of obsession. He had never done this before, fear had always paralyzed him, but in order to end these horrific nightmares tonight he was compelled to look. The rustle of his duvet interrupted the cooing wind as he leaned over his bed. Squeezing his eyes securely shut, he could see a myriad of floating abstract images darting and waltzing within his head.

“He’s not real, he’s not real.” These words circulated desperately as his chestnut hair flopped to the floor; hands gripping the edge of the metal bed. Lewis eventually opened his eyes. His mother’s decomposing body lay still, silent, her eyes staring into the coils of his mattress. The pencil still jarred into her bloodless neck.

From her unyielding mouth echoic words uttered repeatedly:

“It’s you. You are the bogeyman, Lewis. You. Look what you did to me!”

Lewis with frantic hands muffled his ears and screamed. Disorientation engulfed him. The nurse heard his maniacal cries; with a syringe by her side she strode down the whitewashed corridor and entered his stark sterile room, as she did almost every night.

Twilight picked out blue forget-me-nots straggling the downward path. The rockery took on a somber air and evensong absolved the day. Maud and her shadow, both of them grey, swept ghostlike towards the water’s edge where she stooped to lay flowers, picked along the way. This was where he’d proposed: her first husband. Mist covered the water and mallards settled onto the bank, their familiar calls like laughter. She thought she saw a rippling of the water, heard a faint plash but there was no breath of wind. It had been a long while since she’d taken the boat out on the lake. Well, not tonight. Dear Spencer… He’d never really understood her.

Summer always reminded her of Frederic–the most gracious host. There were post holes where the marquee had stood, first, for their wedding, then for anniversaries, birthdays, parties… Their last, according to Frederic, had been the best–a hundred guests, champagne, sparkling music, salmon, ices, strawberries… How Frederic had celebrated life! Maud had retired early with a headache but could hear laughter and music and ducks, protesting at the invasion of their territory. Later he’d come making conjugal demands. She’d suggested taking the boat out for a romantic view of dawn. She’d warned him to be careful. The rockery steps were treacherous enough when sober. Any little trip up could result in a tumble. She’d held a memorial in the marquee, had worn black that day. It would have pleased him–at least a hundred guests. Later, alone by the lake, she thought she saw someone waving across the water. It was just an illusion of the gathering fog.

The shed among the oaks was not a favorite spot for Maud but it had come in handy more than once. Saws were stored there, spades, hoes, sacking. There were… unpleasant associations. Maud had had a row with William here. About money, of course. The upkeep of the house and garden were enormous. She’d been quick to point out that it was her house and that the expensive furnishings and artworks were heirlooms but there was no reasoning with him. He knew a good dealer who would give them top price. She knew how to wield a pickaxe. She sawed off his head and buried it with the others by the lake. Then she rowed out to the middle and heaved the weighty sack overboard.

Maud looked up at the house. The rockery somewhat overgrown was still impressive. The bulbs she’d just planted would cheer things up in spring. She washed the dirt from her hands and contemplated the steep path from the lake. Maud’s trim figure belied her age. Her grey hair swept into a bun at the back was streaked with white. She had never used to think about that climb. Now she sighed. Something sighed back, the wind. She observed the trees. There was no wind. Out on the lake a miasma grew… the plish of an oar. Someone was out there. She saw an arm, a torso.

Quack ack ack ack ack. An arrow of mallards trailed a black slick across the surface of the lake. The ducks were green–green, jellied and putrefying, laughing as they came. Maud stumbled back from the water’s edge and felt a searing pain snap her ankle. She fell onto the burials of her three husbands’ heads. Spencer had that hurt look, always wanting love. Frederic’s sickening, convivial smile. William who’d married her for money only to discover that she’d married him for his. Their faces rose from the soil towards hers. Black daffodils grew from their eye sockets. Their hands reached for her across the oily black water. The high, sickly smell of decaying flesh was all around and the gelatinous horrors that approached laughed no more. She could not escape.

Maud looked up at her only true love but the house was shrouded from view. Her assailants drew close. She had corrupted all and corruption would take retribution.

It was well after midnight. A full moon bathed the bare winter landscape in a powdery light. It was a struggle for Peter to keep his eyes open since he had driven so far and had so far to go. His thoughts were of home, his bed, and sleep.

He was in the middle of nowhere and as fate would have it his car suddenly lost power. There was a chugging sound, the headlights went out and the car rolled to a stop on the gravel by the side of the road.

“What the hell…?” he groaned.

He twisted the key in the ignition but the engine refused to turn over.

“Shit!” he snapped, smacking the steering wheel.

He opened the door and stepped outside. His breath was a cloud on the night air, which bit into the exposed skin of his face and hands. There was no joy with his mobile phone either. It seemed that he was stranded and the only thing to do was to start walking.

After trudging three miles he came across a farmhouse with a light on. It looked to be quite a way from the main road but he had come this far. He jumped the front gate and moved quickly through the misty air towards the light. It was then he heard them. The dogs.

There were two of them. They burst onto the dirt road behind him, snarling and barking savagely, threads of saliva flying from their mouths. Their legs carried them like rockets through the night and even though Peter had started sprinting, their snouts were never far from his heels.

The light ahead grew brighter. He was nearing the farmhouse. His lungs felt as though they were on fire. His throat was as dry as kindling. Part of him wanted to stop and let the beasts tear him apart, but one small voice of reason propelled him forward.

Just meters ahead he could see the worn brass knob on the weathered door. He held out his hand to meet it.

“Let it be open. Let it be open,” he chanted to himself. “Oh God, please let it be open.”

He fell into the front room of the house, spinning around to slam the door in the faces of the dogs. Two almighty bangs rocked the old house, followed by a single yelp. Peter inhaled deeply and then emptied his lungs slowly. His skin was covered in perspiration and there was a dull ache in his chest. The sound of frantic scratching at the door filled his ears and he backed towards the staircase, which rose and twisted into the shadows of the second storey.

Then the scratching stopped. An eerie silence replaced it.

“Well, hello there,” said a voice from behind.

Peter turned around, still trying to catch his breath.

“I’m awfully sorry, ma’am,” he said puffing. “I was being chased.”

The woman, tall and slender with a lush mane of thick black hair cascading over her shoulders, moved down the stairs as if she were floating.

“Come into the kitchen. I’ll see what I can get you to settle those nerves,” she said with a beguiling smile.

Peter followed the woman down a small hallway.

“This is my husband,” she said gesturing to a stocky man sitting at the table.

The man stood and offered his hand to Peter.

“Pleased to meet you,” the man said grinning.

His grip was powerful and when he refused to let go, Peter’s heart began pounding. Suddenly a snout pierced the man’s face and bits of flesh splattered Peter, hitting him before dropping onto the floor. Immediately the creature began snapping at him. Peter jerked his head away, exposing his taut neck to the woman, whose long, sharp teeth glistened in the lamplight before embedding themselves in his neck. Half a scream escaped his lips before it was replaced by a gurgling sound and the sound of meat being torn from bone.

I duck and weave my way through brush and undergrowth, between old hemlocks and pines. I feel a wave push me onward as I seek the source of this feeling in my chest, urging me toward some hidden source. I know this has worked for me before, this knack for finding, for revealing. I used to apply this craft often, in the times of my youth when my awakening was fresh and new. It once seemed so effortless. Now I doubt myself, wondering if this has all been in my head. Have I lost my mind to this fantasy? Luck might have assisted me before more often than I wanted to admit. But now, I wonder if this is all folly, if I am just playing the fool and wandering aimlessly. But as I crest the next ridge I feel it pull again, stronger now. The feeling in my chest explodes in excitement as I rush forward, hunting, preying.

I hired the man just before leaving for Florida. He was recommended by a friend. I had my reservations when he pulled up in a Ford F150 pickup, right taillight missing, windshield cracked and badly in need of a wash. However, my friend had said he was the best so I invited him in.

We toured the greenhouse, discussed his knowledge of exotic plants and went over his fees.

He assured me of his qualifications but I felt I was missing something. I handed him the greenhouse key and the pass-card to the front gate anyway, letting my doubts dissipate like the cloud of carbon dioxide from his muffler as it left my drive. I had a plane to catch and business to conclude.

Standing in the greenhouse this morning, I wished I’d been more thorough. I knew there was trouble when I saw the F150 parked in the rear of the drive. The greenhouse door was open and several pots were broken on the floor. His Oakland Raiders cap lay near a coil of bloated, grayish pink roots, their texture that of hairless, newborn rats. One shredded knee-high rubber boot lay just beyond it. There would be some explaining to do. I wonder if my friend knows a good cleaner. Good help is so hard to find.